G'day everyone! (I can hear you groaning already!) :)
Sorry for the delay replying to you all, I've been busy with FPC and Lazarus wrestling. It's been great fun so far, and boy you have a great Lazarus support community. Amazing.
I'll try and keep this below a hundred pages or so!
I've put together a message discussing the forum -vs- existing technology, and I'll post that later on. First I wanted to feed back based on your comments about the existing pages on the FPC site as they stand.
I guess it's fair to say, your server, your rules, though I'm not convinced that submitting a few bug reports for the site would achieve what we'd all like to accomplish. How about if I just submit one bug report, for the whole front page? That would cover pretty much everything, and honour could be satisfied? :)
Thanks to everyone for explaining in such detail about the historical and current situation. I would never suggest anything that could be worse than what you're already working with, and certainly there would be absolutely minimal cost, in real currency or time and resources, for an open-source solution to the most evident issues.
Unfortunately, I just assumed that it would be more a matter of discussing the details of how to get access, how to ensure we meet everyone's needs in terms of access to current and past releases, ease of navigation, and so on. I certainly didn't consider the likelihood of such a complex and unusual page publishing process. I've been developing websites since 1991, and I've never heard of storing or publishing page content like that, without resorting to ASP or DTML or javascript.
Thanks once again for taking so much time to explain and discuss, I really appreciate the patience and assistance in understanding where you are and where you're headed in the next few years.
OK, that's enough writing this time. Phew!
-Pete