This is to start a little discussion about the future official
Firebird website:

For some more reading about the why and how, see my Firebird HowTo:
http://www.soell.ch/firebird/howto.htm

The FirebirdSql.org site should be set up shortly, so that it exists
when the guys from the Build group have a 1.0 build ready. The
release of this build will be an important step for Firebird and will
hopefully get some coverage (or at least be mentioned ;) in IT
magazines. That's a unique occasion to spread out the word about
Firebird. It would be a great plus if the press release contains the
URL of the official Firebird site.

However, the current site firebird.sourceforge.net is more like a
news site, where people can submit articles, respond to polls and
post their comments, it's an interactive, portal like site, that's
why it uses PHPNuke.

For the official home of Firebird, we need something very different:
A platform for Firebird to present itself and its project to the rest
of the world. Simply look at some comparable sites (MySql.com,
PostgreSql.org, Apache.org).

All the information on this site will be provided by Firebird for the
rest of the world. So there's no need for an interactive site.

Since the amount of information to be presented is also very limited,
typing plain HTML is by far the fastest and most flexible, there's
really no need for a database driven thing here.

Decisions about the content should basically be made by the Firebird
project leaders, but since they probably prefer to spend their time
programming, someone else could maintain the site.

As I said, the site won't be very complicated nor will it have an
awful lot of content, if someone with some HTML skills and a little
spare time would like to contribute...

So, what should be the content of the site?

Especially the structure of the site is important (how to organize
the content). If you have some spare time to look at some other sites
and then suggest a cool structure here, that'd be great. We could
then compare and refine.

It will be inevitable to also mention InterBase things on the
Firebird website. But I suggest to clearly keep them apart, to let
the visitor know InterBase things are not from the community. For
example like this:

Documentation:
1. Firebird documents
a) Firebird installation guide
b) ...

2. Third partie documents
a) ....

The same for utilities, connectivity components etc.

So this doesn't exactly reproduce the information on IBPhoenix I
guess, at least things are grouped differently, using the Firebird /
Other criterion.

In the "Support" section of the businesses of IBPhoenix and others
who contribute to Firebird could be described.

If someone has a nice idea concerning webdesign, just suggest. I
would recommend to keep the site simple. One can hardly impress
anyone with fancy design things nowadays.

Markus