On 09/14/2010 01:34 PM, Jeroen van Meeuwen (Kolab Systems) wrote:
The entire http://www.cyrusimap.org/ site is now constructed using
mediawiki with the exception of the landing page and the /docs directory.
I attempted to make it obvious that this was the case here:
http://www.cyrusimap.org/mediawiki/index.php/Contribute#Website_content_con
tributions
but that seems to have not been sufficient. Our initial goal was to
make the site not appear to be a wiki so the average end user wouldn't
be distracted, but anyone who wants to contribute to the site may easily
register and do so.
We're going to give this some time and see how folks react. If people
overwhelmingly want the site to look more obviously like a wiki, we can
revisit our decision.
I could help you hiding the fact there even is a mediawiki by removing it from
the URL, if you want me to. Although at some point, of course, it will become
apparent there is in fact a mediawiki ;-)
I'm actually doing the exact same thing right now, twice, for other websites.
Tell me if I should go ahead and apply some magic somewhere.
What we had before was one static site that nobody ever updated, a
separate bugzilla that had Cyrus stuff and a bunch of unrelated stuff in
it, and a separate wiki that was mostly ignored and contained a lot of spam.
We wanted to improve on that in two main ways. First, we wanted to
combine everything into one cohesive site. Second, we wanted it to be
easier for anyone to contribute content to the site. From these modest
goals, we decided that we'd set the site up in such a way that a casual
visitor would see something that appeared to just be the Cyrus website,
but anyone who wanted to contribute to the site would easily be able to
do so. As such, there's a static landing page and an auto-generated
/docs directory. Aside from that, the entire site is one big wiki.
There was never an intent to really hide the fact that it's a wiki, and
you can see on the Contribute page that I prominently announced that the
site is almost entirely constructed using Mediawiki. I still don't
think we need to do any magic to conceal the mediawiki directory path in
the URLs.
Having received some feedback, I think I probably spent too much time
thinking about what new Cyrus users want/need from the cyrusimap.org
site and I didn't spend enough time thinking about existing users who
were used to what we already had. That said, I haven't heard any
feedback that makes me wholly reconsider our design choices, but I'm
sure we'll have to make some changes along the way where they make sense.
Thanks,
Dave
--
Dave McMurtrie, SPE
Email Systems Team Leader
Carnegie Mellon University,
Computing Services
