I haven't read 'useful macros' thread yet so please excuse me if that 
thread already involves the following concept.

It's one that germinated when I was doing the server re-build and 
thinking of ways to avoid having heaps and heaps of PHP code to maintain 
stuff like a HOF, texture library, users and permissions for each, audit 
trail, undo, copyright assignments and so forth (we don't have most of 
those things, but if the community is to help manage the site we need 
them, or something that achieves the same end).

Put another way, it's been said before that we ought to take more help 
from regular newsgroup users; the problem has generally being writing 
the infrastructure to allow e.g. editing of the HOF, links (though the 
latter already has some support).

I like the idea of turning this on its head - instead of managing users 
and permissions and merging content from multiple sources, it occurs to 
me that we could just do it the other way around ... set up the repos on 
github in a format that would be consumable (even if just by scraping 
HTTP) that allows the povray.org server to reach-out and ingest it in 
one step (and rinse lather repeat). github has the infrastructure to 
manage the users, merges, history, and so forth, thus relieving us of 
having to do it. It also makes it easier for someone to contribute (all 
they need is a github account and an understanding of the way the repo 
is laid out in order to contribute. No need to have to create an account 
on povray.org and ask for edit permissions).

I bet we could find a way of handling the HOF this way. With a few 
trusted community members in charge of QC and, accepting pull requests, 
and maintaining meta-data when needed, the HOF would (from the point of 
view of us) become self-managing (because I sure as heck don't do it now).

IF that works, well then there's the link collection, textures, what 
else? What can you think up?

-- Chris

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