I'm a fan of static files, since we're frequently hammered when new releases come out, etc.
Well, i belive that PHP does not use as much resources as you think... We could also: - disable the random screenshot on new releases (takes some time to load) - make the front-site static on releases (but i dont think this helps a lot)
but anyway, the big traffic might be the downloads...!?! try to move all the builds to other servers on the next release... this might give a less homeopathic effect than switching to static pages...
As far as "out of date" translations, I think we can avoid it by having a rule that says, "any translation more than 14 days behind the main site should be disabled", and "any translation not updated by release time should be disabled". This will make sure we've always got either a recent translation, or none, forcing a fall-back to the main site.
Thoughts?
yes. try my new mockup: http://www.inkscape.org/index2.php
It will switch to your preferred language automatically, but you may override that by clicking the flags the news are in single files like news/de/2005/09/003.inc if a news hasnt been translated, the english one is shown automatically. also, it always shows the news of the current and the past month. no extra work needed to update that. and layout/content is fully separated. like announced in my last mail. i plan to do it similar to other pages like sceenshots, so the message will be in your language if available, english if not.
i hope, you all like this mockup, so i didn't do all this for nothing ;) (yeah, took a while...)
if that would be okay, i'd switch the site to that.
greets, Caliga