There is not much to say about setting up the project web site from a technical point of view: setting up a web server and writing web pages are fairly simple tasks, and most of the important things to say about layout and arrangement were covered in the previous chapter. The web site's main function is to present a clear and welcoming overview of the project, and to bind together the other tools (the version control system, bug tracker, etc.). If you don't have the expertise to set up a web server yourself, it's usually not hard to find someone who does and is willing to help out. Nonetheless, to save time and effort, people often prefer to use one of the canned hosting sites.
There are two main advantages to using a canned site. The first is server capacity and bandwidth: their servers are beefy boxes sitting on really fat pipes. No matter how successful your project gets, you're not going to run out of disk space or swamp the network connection. The second advantage is simplicity. They have already chosen a bug tracker, a version control system, a mailing list manager, an archiver, and everything else you need to run a site. They've configured the tools, and are taking care of backups for all the data stored in the tools. You don't need to make many decisions. All you have to do is fill in a form, press a button, and suddenly you've got a project web site.
These are pretty significant benefits. The disadvantage, of course, is that you must accept their choices and configurations, even if something different would be better for your project. Usually canned sites are adjustable within certain narrow parameters, but you will never get the fine-grained control you would have if you set up the site yourself and had full administrative access to the server.
A perfect example of this is the handling of generated files. Certain project web pages may be generated files—for example, there are systems for keeping FAQ data in an easy-to-edit master format, from which HTML, PDF, and other presentation formats can be generated. As explained in «Version everything» earlier in this chapter, you wouldn't want to version the generated formats, only the master file. But when your web site is hosted on someone else's server, it may be impossible to set up a custom hook to regenerate the online HTML version of the FAQ whenever the master file is changed. The only workaround is to version the generated formats too, so that they show up on the web site.
There can be larger consequences as well. You may not have as much control over presentation as you would wish. Some of the canned hosting sites allow you to customize your web pages, but the site's default layout usually ends up showing through in various awkward ways. For example, some projects that host themselves at SourceForge have completely customized home pages, but still point developers to their "SourceForge page" for more information. The SourceForge page is what would be the project's home page, had the project not used a custom home page. The SourceForge page has links to the bug tracker, the CVS repository, downloads, etc. Unfortunately, a SourceForge page also contains a great deal of extraneous noise. The top is a banner ad, often an animated image. The left side is a vertical arrangement of links of little relevance to someone interested in the project. The right side is often another advertisement. Only the center of the page is devoted to truly project-specific material, and even that is arranged in a confusing way that often makes visitors unsure of what to click on next.
Behind every individual aspect of SourceForge's design, there is no doubt a good reason—good from SourceForge's point of view, such as the advertisements. But from an individual project's point of view, the result can be a less-than-ideal web page. I don't mean to pick on SourceForge; similar concerns apply to many of the canned hosting sites. The point is that there's a tradeoff. You get relief from the technical burdens of running a project site, but only at the price of accepting someone else's way of running it.
Only you can decide whether canned hosting is best for your project. If you choose a canned site, leave open the option of switching to your own servers later, by using a custom domain name for the project's "home address". You can forward the URL to the canned site, or have a fully customized home page at the public URL and hand users off to the canned site for sophisticated functionality. Just make sure to arrange things such that if you later decide to use a different hosting solution, the project's address doesn't need to change.
The largest and most well-known hosting site is SourceForge. Two other sites providing the same or similar services are savannah.gnu.org and BerliOS.de. A few organizations, such as the Apache Software Foundation and Tigris.org[21], give free hosting to open source projects that fit well with their missions and their community of existing projects.
Haggen So did a thorough evaluation of various canned hosting sites, as part of the research for his Ph.D. thesis, Construction of an Evaluation Model for Free/Open Source Project Hosting (FOSPHost) sites. The results are at http://www.ibiblio.org/fosphost/, and see especially the very readable comparison chart at http://www.ibiblio.org/fosphost/exhost.htm.
A problem that is not strictly limited to the canned sites, but is most often found there, is the abuse of user login functionality. The functionality itself is simple enough: the site allows each visitor to register herself with a username and password. From then on it keeps a profile for that user, and project administrators can assign the user certain permissions, for example, the right to commit to the repository.
This can be extremely useful, and in fact it's one of the prime advantages of canned hosting. The problem is that sometimes user login ends up being required for tasks that ought to be permitted to unregistered visitors, specifically the ability to file issues in the bug tracker, and to comment on existing issues. By requiring a logged-in username for such actions, the project raises the involvement bar for what should be quick, convenient tasks. Of course, one wants to be able to contact someone who's entered data into the issue tracker, but having a field where she can enter her email address (if she wants to) is sufficient. If a new user spots a bug and wants to report it, she'll only be annoyed at having to fill out an account creation form before she can enter the bug into the tracker. She may simply decide not to file the bug at all.
The advantages of user management generally outweigh the disadvantages. But if you can choose which actions can be done anonymously, make sure not only that all read-only actions are permitted to non-logged-in visitors, but also some data entry actions, especially in the bug tracker and, if you have them, wiki pages.