Monday through Thursday of this week was the PyCon sprint session. I had hoped to work on a few things including a project of my own, but I spent most of the time working on the pydotorg project and following up with some work items. Read on for more information about what I did at the sprints.

The pydotorg project is what we call the python.org web-site work. This year we were working to get a new site up, which can be viewed at http://beta.python.org/. It's a new look and design for the python.org web site, which has been talked about for at least 2 years. However, the migration of existing content over is a huge job. The PSF paid Tim Parkins to do the conversion and design the new site, but it's just a huge job and he needed some help.

There were 4 or 5 of us working on the migration. Sadly, the new site uses this fairly hairy tool-chain that requires a fair bit of time to install and a rebuild of the site can take 5 to 10 minutes. This slowed things down a bit. We made a lot of progress though. As the Content Migration Wiki shows. If you're interested in helping out, that's got a list of things to do.

On Monday I beat down a few quick tasks like migrating the News and /pycon sections over, removing a bunch of CVS crappe from the new site. Then I figured I'd do a quick job of moving the PEPs over to the new site. Sadly, that took me until Thursday mid-afternoon... It was a much bigger job than I'd imagined.

There's still a pretty big pile of stuff left to do before the new site can go live. Even then, it'll probably be buggy. We could spend an amazing amount of time polishing it, but unless we push it into use fairly quickly, the project will probably just die. Guido apparently likes the current site, so he's fairly close to just pronouncing the new site "dead". Which is probably better than it dragging on another year or two. The amount of distraction that can cause can be excessive.

So, hopefully in the next week there will be a new look and feel for the old site.
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