Suggestion: keep the latest release announcement line at the top of the front 
page.  Have a link from there to the full announcement (and a link to the 
download itself.)

Have a second line below this labeled something like "previous releases" going 
off to a page that has all these cumulative announcements.

let's do this before 3.2.0 release...

I'm thinking of just setting up a weblog at somewhere like http://wordpress.com/
-- a big, reliable, third-party weblog host.  Anyone not keen on that idea?

-1

Doesn't that bring up problems with hosting official content on a non-Apache site?

I don't see what having another website with news would do -- why would people
ever visit it? Isn't the point of the news that we want it to appear on the top
of our website? Could we not just make a news page with the current site and
have the latest news item appear on the front page?

Presumably it would also be possible to have apache host a blog for us, if
necessary.

I agree the current page needs a trim. Removing the old news would be
sufficient, in my opinion.

I think we generally need a cleanup of our website, and perhaps some new design
work.  I've heard people making comments about it, though when I suggest to them
that we're happy if people want to work on it for us, they go away.

Otherwise I don't think we need to go to an external party.  That's just going
to confuse people.

Planet Apache publishes release announcements all the time.  Why not just use
that method.  I'm with Duncan, I don't see a reason to start up a blog just to
make announcements.  Reformat the main page or something to make it look nicer,
key into Planet Apache for release announcements, but more than that is overkill
IMO.

There is always the Wiki to post announcements to.

I'm also with Duncan and Michael on not needing a place just to post
announcements--it isn't like we even do all that many per year.

Maybe after I finish up the "What's New" for 3.2 I'll then tackle some
re-designing of the website.  

OK, sounds like an external release-announcements blog is unpopular. ;)
FWIW, here are the reasons I was considering it to be a possibility:

- 1. having a basic "news page" is not as friendly as a "news blog" (using a
  blog allows (a) web-based publishing of new items (b) user-subscribable RSS
  feeds (c) syndication to other sites via feeds)

- 2. the ASF has no existing blog hosting system (Jakarta have some hacks to
  publish an RSS page from their news page, but it's frankly horrific and
  there's no way we should adopt it: see
 
http://jakarta.apache.org/site/news/index.html#How%20To%20Add%20News%20(Committers)
)

- 3. ASF infrastructure don't have the bandwidth to set one up or host it
  (we've been waiting 18 months for the relatively simple issue of email
  submission to bugzilla, so this is clearly the case)

- 4. several ASF-linked blogs (such as http://feather.planetapache.org/ ,
  http://www.apachenews.org/ , and planetapache.org itself) are already hosted
  and run external to ASF infrastructure.


However, I'm not too bothered, anyway.  Using a "news" page on the current
site, or a wiki page, is probably the best compromise.

(PS: regarding Planet Apache -- that is, in fact, an *external* site offering
syndication of *external*, non-ASF, blogs!  It's not hosted by the ASF.  in
other words, an external blog would of course be part of Planet Apache.)

ok, now done.

I see your point about RSS feeds -- I suppose that could be useful. If webmake
could create an RSS feed, would that solve the problem? :-)

Anyways, I like the change you've made, but I think it might still be nice to
see one (and only one) news item on the front page, perhaps with a link to News.

My $.02 worth.  I think that the current release should be listed on the
main page.

interesting factoid: it appears mod_mbox, the archiving software, gained the
ability to output an Atom feed sometime last year:

http://mail-archives.apache.org/mod_mbox/spamassassin-announce/?format=atom

it's ugly as all hell, but at least it provides a feed now.