On 4 Aug 2007, at 03:22, Jesse Ross wrote: > With 0.2 out the door and work starting on 0.3, I think it's time > to put a fresh face on the website. Some site-related issues I've > noticed:
I agree that the site needs some work. > - The blog is using a different content management system > (Blogger) than the rest of the site (Mediawiki), thus we're all > maintaining two separate accounts to get content onto the site. This is the one that really irritates me. The Blogger interface is absolutely terrible. The rich text editing thing doesn't work at all (it randomly drops characters, or decides I want to overwrite something I've already written). The HTML entry seems to mangle my HTML in unexpected ways. It doesn't notify me of comments left on my blog entries, so I don't reply to them punctually, and it doesn't notify people that I've responded to them, making the comments system useless (not to mention the lack of threading etc.) Having to maintain a separate account for that is mildly irritating too. > - Our blog is not functionally integrated into the overall site > (URL or navigation-wise) Very true. The news part really should be much more tightly integrated with the blog; it seems very strange to be producing both. > - Content management/navigation of Mediawiki is problematic (pages > are not in well-defined parent categories, end-users have > difficulty accessing relevant content) Part of this is a layout issue with our current design. We have some navigation boxes at the top, and some on the side, and I tend to forget about the ones at the top (they don't provide a strong visual clue that they are navigation related). > - Recent code progress is still not in a prominent location > (making it hard for users to know that we're still alive) It would be really great to have the RSS feed from cia.vc on the front page somewhere, but I don't think mediawiki has a good way of doing this. Showing the times of the last svn commits is a great way of saying 'we're still an active project.' I don't get that from the site at the moment. I also don't update things as often as I should because MediaWiki markup is a pain to use (and very badly documented). Even though it's a bit verbose, I wouldn't mind having to enter [X] HTML, although the big problem with that is that there is no extra indirection with URLs, so you have to be careful with them. The web space we have on GNA supports server side includes, so it would be relatively easy to use this directly if we had a set of template pages and a set of banner includes (e.g. header, footer, sidebar). To make a new page, you'd just copy one of the templates and link to it. I think part of the problem with the current layout is that it's very easy with MediaWiki to create new pages, leading to a lot of sprawl. > - We need good, recent documentation in an easily searchable/ > browsable format I would like every svn commit to be accompanied by an automatic make of the documentation on the server. This would be possible with the svn commit hooks if we ran our own svn server (which I don't suggest), but is harder with GNA. I've filed a feature request with GNA. Another option is to use the downloads area to host the documentation (e.g. http://download.gna.org/etoile/etoile.html). We can upload to this using rsync, rather than svn, which makes it a lot easier to automate. If we added a target to etoile.make that would set the document install directory to a temporary location, make and install the documentation there, and then rsync it to the server, that would probably be helpful. > - URLs have a lot of cruft (ie: the About page is at http:// > www.etoile-project.org/etoile/mediawiki/index.php? > title=EtoileWiki:About , which would be much better as just http:// > etoile-project.org/about ) I agree. > - Our identity is using violet, white, gray and black now -- the > blue, green and patterned background are not a major part of our > current identity as of 0.2, and will not be used at all for 0.3 > - Large images (such as screenshots) overflow the page's edges So do wide tables etc. > - The large central flower image, while attractive, provides no > functional information and becomes quickly redundant on subpages I agree. On a small form-factor device, I have to scroll on every page. > - The blog should be using a similar theme as the rest of the site Agreed. > I know most people are comfortable with Mediawiki based on > conversations we've had before, but I'm wondering if using > something else wouldn't be better. In the past I've proposed > WordPress, but Drupal looks like it might be a good long-term > solution also/instead. I'm wondering if anyone has any other > suggestions about what to do with the site, or if there are any > major objections to moving to something drastically different in > the process of building 0.3. After 0.2, we used something like 50GB of bandwidth in three days. Hopefully 0.3 will be even more popular, and so anything that involves none of us having to pay for that seems like a good solution. I would advocate putting as much of the site on GNA as possible. Use the website area in svn with SSI for the main pages, and the download area for automatically-generated documentation. I'm not sure what to suggest for the blog. I found a support item from 2004 saying GNA planned on supporting PHP 'soon,' but as of 2007 they still don't. They do support Apache SSI, which apparently allows the running of external programs, but I'm not entirely sure how one would go about using this. Without this, allowing comments is quite hard. > I have some proposals for a new site hierarchy, which I've outlined > below -- if no one has any objections to it, I'd like us to move to > something that is more closely in line with this structure, > regardless of what underlying technical solution we use. A clean > URL hierarchy will help us keep new content focused and near other > relevant content. It will be important to add redirects > into .htaccess so that old links are redirected to the proper > location. This won't be easy as it'll have to all be done by hand, > but it needs to happen to make sure people are ending up in > (approximately) the right location. > > Home etoile-project.org > - News /news (blogs, press, feeds) I like these sub-categories. We should try to keep a clear distinction between blogs (what developers are saying) and news (what the project is saying officially). > - Etoile /etoile -> /etoile/$version (overview) I'm not sure we need the $version bit here. Could you elaborate? > - Download /download -> /etoile/$version/download > (should also provide a link to /more) I presume this will be a little wrapper around the download.gna.org/ etoile stuff? > - Features /features -> /etoile/$version/features I'm not sure why this is separate from /Etoile. > - Support /support (contact, bug submission, etc) Yup. > - Get More /more (apps, add-ons, etc) I'm not completely sure what goes here. > - For Developers /dev -> dev.etoile-project.org > - Getting Started dev.etoile-project.org/start > - Installation dev.etoile-project.org/install These two are definitely needed. Currently we have more accurate information on the blog than on the main site for installing. > - Documentation dev.etoile-project.org/docs (needs to allow for > > user comments) We can automatically generate PDF and HTML documentation for frameworks, and I suggest we start doing that and putting it online soon. Any insufficiently documented framework should be treated as a bug for the 0.3 release. > - Status dev.etoile-project.org/status (CIA feed) I'd like to see this on the front page. As soon as people visit the site, there should be something saying 'look at us! We're an active project.' The GNUstep site is the exact opposite of this; the front apge rarely changes, and there is nothing dated on the page giving an indication of when it was last modified, so a casual visitor could easily assume the project was dead. > ( -> represents a redirect) A lot of the exact URLs will be defined by how we implement it in the end. If we are using GNA, then this will affect things unless we put some frame wrapper on etoile-project.org. > Please let me know if there is anything I'm missing. Other > comments, suggestions, flames, etc are always welcome. Two things I would say are missing: - FAQ. We want a quick reference to questions like 'are you trying to clone OS X' - People It might just be me, but I find it easier to trust a Free Software project if people are willing to put their names to it. Having faceless developers makes it much harder to relate to the project. We have something like this on the current site, but it's quite well hidden. David _______________________________________________ Etoile-discuss mailing list [email protected] https://mail.gna.org/listinfo/etoile-discuss
