Today someone emailed me directly about their interest in becoming a
committer to the RocketMQ project. I explained that committership is based
on the merit of their contributions to the project and I encouraged them to
join the dev@rocket mailing list to start some discussions. Upon looking
for the link to the page on the RocketMQ site that provides the mailing
lists, it was very difficult to locate. So I have some suggestions for
improving the website to make it more user-friendly and to drive more
community contribution. Below are a some of my suggestions for starters:

* The content from the Contributing page that currently resides on the old
Github project's wiki (
https://github.com/apache/incubator-rocketmq/blob/master/CONTRIBUTING.md).
This content should be moved to the Community page on the new ASF site.

* From the new Community page, please link to the Best Practice in Pull
Request page.

* The title of the Contact page (
http://rocketmq.incubator.apache.org/about/contact/) should be changed to
'Support' or 'Mailing Lists' and made much more prominent instead of buried
with the Team page. Please also consider adding a link to it in the header
where you see Documentation, Blog, Community, etc.

* Place a link to the Download page in the header where you see
Documentation, Blog, Community, etc.

* You should consider moving the Blog to the home page to show more project
activity to anyone who visits the site.

* The Branching Model page outlines the use of Git Flow and yet it provides
no reference to the official Git Flow documentation or scripts. Please add
some attribution to the original docs from Vincent Driessen (
http://nvie.com/posts/a-successful-git-branching-model/) and the git-flow
tools (https://github.com/nvie/gitflow).

Last, but definitely not least, please always keep in mind when writing
documentation that you are writing for people who are learning RocketMQ.
Such new users need to understand the RocketMQ architecture and how to use
it in a production environment. Currently, there is very little
documentation available that addresses using RocketMQ in a production
environment. I'm sure that there is knowledge of such operational usage of
RocketMQ from it's deep use at Alibaba. I would really like to see that
knowledge documented to begin to prove to new users that RocketMQ is
production ready and already used on probably the biggest e-commerce sites
in the world.

Please always keep the following question in mind as you write new features
and documentation: If I were a new user of RocketMQ with zero knowledge, do
the docs provide enough information to develop with and deploy RocketMQ for
production use?

Bruce

-- 
perl -e 'print
unpack("u30","D0G)U8V4\@4VYY9&5R\"F)R=6-E+G-N>61E<D\!G;6%I;\"YC;VT*" );'

ActiveMQ in Action: http://bit.ly/2je6cQ
Blog: http://bsnyder.org/ <http://bruceblog.org/>
Twitter: http://twitter.com/brucesnyder

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