Hi Ian,

Your help would be very much welcome and appreciated.

You’ve actually come at a very good time. Our whole backend, known as RosCMS has just been rewritten and is now at version 4.  It’s a content management system similar to Joomla, but written to better serve the needs of this project.

Whilst the backend is now running and stable, the frontend needs a complete rewrite. We had a design contest a few months ago and this was the winning design :  http://img200.imageshack.us/img200/7833/reactoswebsitedesign4.png

So far no one has had the time to make a start on it, so we’re still running on the now outdated site. What we need is for someone to get involved in bringing this new layout to life.

It’s probably best if you join the IRC channel and chat to our web designer. He’s called Danny and he goes by the nick of DangerGround in IRC. He should be able to give you more info and guidance on what is required.

I’m posting this mail to the ros-dev mailing list so he and our other web guys can pick it up.

You can continue to converse with me via private mail if you prefer to.

Regards,

Ged Murphy.

From: Ian Hilton [mailto:ian7hilton@gmail.com]
Sent: 04 June 2010 02:13
To: dev-interest@reactos.org
Subject: I have a lot of Questions

       Hi My name is Ian Joseph Hilton I am a freshman in community college. I consider myself a website developer of sorts in training, and for the past year or so been familiarizing myself with website coding. I have been mostly using Google based programs as my platform, and have so far just barely stuck my toe in the water in attempting to write extensions for Google's chrome browser. My main project is what I call Titanways Teaching (or Tutoring) In Terrific And New ways and was my High school Exhibition project required by the state of California to graduate, and it has got moderate attention. the link is here : http://sites.google.com/site/titanwayssite/

     I know what you must be thinking by now most likely that I have lack of what you need and as my Uncle who currently writes programs for Medical Equipment says I need at least two years or so to be taken seriously and not laughed, but it never hurts to ask some things and worst comes to worse I learn some things to point me in new directions which is always great. 

     Anyway I of course have been aware of your ReactOS  project for a few years and only recently has it occurred to me that I should inquire somethings regarding it. Note I have not been "Tainted" at all as whatever you are talking about with Microsoft's source code totally goes over my head.  I do use XP as my operating system However on a Toshiba NB 305 net-book. This is because a lot of my programs I am satisfied with run on this operating system. My point to that is my net-book has further taught me terms like debugging as not every program will run on it without a little help by doing various things like editing a config file to fit its 1024x600 resolution frame.  I has also used Linux Ubuntu and am familiar with Macintosh interface via that is the main platform students use at general educational institutions. 

     Now to get right to the point, right now I might not know much but if there is anyway in the future that I may offer assistance in any form I would be happy to, and also any helpful training or guidance you can point me in in regards to coding website components for ReactOS would be even better. I use mostly opensource alternatives to windows programs anyway such as Open Office.org as I kinda share that feeling with you that Microsoft kinda took a monopolistic view to its commercial applications.

        I wish to ask how compatible is it currently with opensource apps that run on Java platforms if it is integrated with as well as the web browsers that it is compatible with? I have been familiarizing myself with all three of the basic website rendering engines Trident, Gecko, and Web-kit  via the experimental triple engine browser being developed by a Japanese software Company and is known as Lunascape. I also want to know if this OS can support docking software such as Object dock or Rocket-dock and if not what would I say need to do to learn how to make that kind of thing a possibility. I will conclude by saying once again right now you may view me as inexperienced but that I am quickly learning and any pointers I take gratefully and with interest in consideration. 

High Regards to you, Ian 

P.S. will be taking Computer Classes in future semesters however it is my opinion that the best in the field should try to learn from scratch ,and so I am going to start by attempting to teach myself to write programs in C/C++ coding and see where that leads