So, finally having digged out of the heap'o'work, here it goes:
On Tue, 2006-12-12 at 09:48 -0800, Will Glass-Husain wrote: > Hi Henning, > > As I mentioned before, the layout look great. > > I have specific thoughts on the front page of the site. This page > provides the first impression for new users and is a frequent stop for > intermediate/experienced users. I think we should aim it to provide > immediate help to these two group and move all other content away. > > New users need to know > --> What the heck is Velocity? +1. So what is it? Is it a templating engine? A toolbox for a templating engine? What is the "Velocity project". I'm struggling with that answer myself. ;-) > --> How do I build a webapp with Velocity? -0. IMHO you are wrong here. If you say "how do I start developing with Velocity", then I agree. I resent narrowing Velocity down to a "web technology". IMHO we should much more focus on "general templating engine" and leave the "developing a web application" to the domain of Velocity Tools (and other explicitly web-related, velocity-based technologies like Click and VelTools. Offering links on "developing web applications with Velocity", "embedding Velocity into your project", "writing a general templating solution with Velocity" would be great. The question again is, "Is this part of the wrapper site or part of the engine docs"? > --> What's the latest version? +1. Latest Version of what? We already have three sub projects. > --> Is there recent activity or news about this project? +1. And I want to automatize it with an RSS feed. Maven 2 plugin anyone? ;-) > --> How do I get help? +1 > > Intermediate/experienced users need to know > --> Where can I find the Javadocs, users guide, etc Hm. In my experience from projects where I proposed Velocity, the most important question is "how do I download it". Javadocs, guides etc. comes later. > > Stuff that isn't as important (and shouldn't take up valuable front page > space) > --> Anything more than a sentence about the Velocity TLP organization No. "The Velocity Project" is IMHO != "The Velocity Engine Project". Do we want a first class citizen? This is the wrapper site for the TLP and the most important thing for me is that this site should change as little as possible. Having everything at your finger tips means, that you can have a stable page with all the information that you can bookmark. Not, that it must be the first page on the site. >From an user perspective it is (IMHO) much more important that if I bookmark a page from the wrapper site, it is around for a very long time. The information on it might change but the page itself should not. The ASF has a number of projects that are notoriously bad in that respect. So these projects end up with "everything on index.html" because this is the only page that they can guarantee to be always there. > --> Anything about the Apache Software Foundation -1 here. Velocity is a part of the ASF and either we are doomed to have "this is our license", "these are our goals", "these are our rules" pages or just say "we are a part of the ASF" prominently and then link to the general information pages. > --> Long menus in the body of the page. > > It's tempting to say "this is a hierarchy -- we shouldn't put engine > specific info on the home page-- everything goes on the individual > project page". But I disagree-- for ease of use we need to orient > users immediately on the main page of the site. And I disagree here. If you are a first timer, the TLP site should give you an overview on what is there. I remember coming as a first timer (and initial exposure to Apache/Jakarta) to the Turbine web site and getting swamped with "Turbine", "Fulcrum", "Stratum", "Scarab", even "Ant" and later "Maven" and not being able to make heads or tails of it because there was simply no overview there. I want to avoid that with Velocity first-timers. You get to the site. You see what is there. You might even decide that "Tools" is the right thing for you, even though you came here hearing about "Velocity" as in "Velocity Engine". If you are a seasoned user or just a "Velocity Templating engine" user, you bookmark http://velocity.apache.org/engine/ and you are done. The one project I try to model the site after is the Struts web site. Struts basically is one project. However, the actual project information is *not* available from its title page. It is general information. If you are a struts developer, you don't bookmark the first page. You bookmark e.g. http://struts.apache.org/1.3.5/ for struts 1.3.5. And that page will not change. > It might be helpful to look at other multiproject sites, e.g. > Hibernate (http://hibernate.org) First two paragraphs - about the main > project. Short third paragraph about the organization. Then comes a > short summary of each project. Then recent news (with dates). On the > left is clear, bold menu with prominent link to "Documentation", > "Download", and "Forum & Mailing Lists". Not saying this is perfect, > but all the user questions listed above are answered with a minimum of > scrolling or clicking around. Yes, I'm fine with that. I'm not fine with "moving Velocity Engine docs to top-level and pushing everything else aside". I think that we both do want the same thing. The Hibernate site is BTW very similar to the Struts site. [...] The rest of the comments are about pages that for me are either "spare pages" or "stuff shuffling around". I agree with these comments but this is just temporary stuff. Thanks a lot for your input, I'm pretty sure that this will work out in a way that we all can agree on. Please continue commenting and or putting patches in. I don't want that to be an one-man show. Best regards Henning -- Henning P. Schmiedehausen -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] | J2EE, Linux, 91054 Buckenhof, Germany -- +49 9131 506540 | Apache person Open Source Consulting, Development, Design | Velocity - Turbine guy "Save the cheerleader. Save the world." --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
