Andrew C. Oliver wrote:
> > > since i answer the asf email, this is something that has bugged > the crap out of me, and about which i have complained several > times to no avail. > > there is no canonical /mailing-lists.html location to which > i can point people for j random project, so i have to tell them > to search the project site for the info. that sucks. > >
so fix it.
Uh, Andy, that helped a lot. Thanks. :)
Can you estimate the emount of energy it takes to go into every project and tell them to update their site? or, if you want to do it, why do you think they would agree with you? maybe they don't like the URI name, maye they have a community.html page that already lists those things. or maybe, for whatever reason, they don't want development mail lists to be easy to find (I did needed that once in order to slow down community building!)
The reason why I started Forrest was to create enough momentum to take care of those things, but the other way around.
People fix things when it's *convenient* to them. So, I thought, let's write a tool that generates a site for them and forces some guidelines on them, and they will slowly switch.
In fact, Forrest is just *one* possible use of Cocoon. Forrest is a Cocoon spin-off, but the great value is its focus: come up with a way to generate a *nice* web site, nice navigation, nice look&feel, easy content administration. In the future, we might also include a web-driven content management system on top of Forrest (running Cocoon underneath).
I spent several months with my former girlfriend (who is a usability engineer) to design the Forrest layouts and the usability of the navigation. A lot of work has ben put into that, while other efforts (maven, stylebook) simply didn't care about navigation and usability, but just about look and ease of regeneration.
Of course, I'm way biased here, so don't start a maven vs. forrest pissing contest, please.
I just want to point out that the only way I see to fix our web interface problems is to create better tools and hardcode a number of usability guidelines into them.
Starting with a project.xml info file is a great thing and we can keep going from that point on.
-- Stefano Mazzocchi <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> --------------------------------------------------------------------
