I spent a fair while walking circles in the basement (carrying the unhappy baby) and thinking on the download pages.
My first thoughts were on what they exist for. From an info-arch point of view, they are a search system in addition to the project pages themselves. The fact that the project pages link back to them is a mistake on the usability side (though does make our lives fractionally easier).
My next thought is, why are there separate pages for mailing lists, source code, cvs repositories, binaries? A lot of information is repeated in attempting to provide navigation to get to the part desired. One reason for the separate pages is so that separate information may be obtained, but I believe there is a different solution to that one.
So as a general direction, I think we should have a single project summary page that provides the links to all the relevant resources. This does give us a problem with how to handle the context sensitive message of how to use the resource. I think that closer.cgi has the solution there:
For example:
http://www.apache.org/dyn/closer.cgi/maven/binaries/maven-1.0.2.exe
It has problems. Mainly in that it doesn't really provide much a context sensitive message. It should be mentioning signatures, keys, md5s etc. It also loses the navigation of the project it's on and dumps you into a global Apache navigation. However, I think it's the right solution architectually. A dynamic page that contains a standard message and is filled with dynamic info.
So I see the same thing existing for cvs/svn (context message is how to use cvs/svn etc), mail lists (usual message about politeness etc), downloads, jars (ibiblio links?), javadocs etc.
Now, circling the basement is not conducive to coherence, or correct spelling I suspect, so I'm going to ramble a bit here in vague justification. Jakarta is different to other TLP's in that it's an umbrella. One of the reasons I like the approach above is that it is playing to Jakarta's role as an umbrella. Each project will link directly to the dynamic resource page, ie) closer.cgi for downloads. Jakarta then provides an umbrella navigation system for when people want to see all this information from a single location and not click on each sub-project.
---
Baby's feed is near an end I suspect, so I need to wrap things up a bit. Direct comments on the current binindex page (with srcindex inheriting most of these flaws):
1) Demo Builds, Milestone Builds: Do we even use these terms regularly? We have 1 demo build, and I thought we did RC's rather than Milestones. I'm not sure we even need to push the nightlies at this level; the project pages themselves should be fine as anyone looking for a nightly is probably deeply involved with that project as a user.
2) I'm not sure we need to advertise the Apache blog or Jakarta news here. It's on the front page, why use up valuable space.
3) Why advertise related projects? They're in the navbar about an inch away.
4) Same complaint as Martin has. Why have the download information if we let people click right past it. The table at the top is a noble effort, but I think we need a lot more to solve the problem.
5) Agreed, Commons needs some kind of grouping to bring it together.
That's it. Hopefully much food for thought.
Hen
On Mon, 27 Dec 2004, Martin Cooper wrote:
On Tue, 28 Dec 2004, Tetsuya Kitahata wrote:
Just I've tried to improve the usability of Download Pages in jakarta.a.o. (by Adding "Table Of Contents" in "Release Source Drops" section)
The problem I have with this change is that it pretty much guarantees that people will completely skip reading anything about the fact that they are downloading from a mirror site, and especially the fact that they need to verify the signature of what they download. If we could put that info before the links, I would be much happier. ;-)
-- Martin Cooper
http://jakarta.apache.org/site/binindex.cgi http://jakarta.apache.org/site/sourceindex.cgi
The migration of CVS repository (jakarta-site2) into SVN had slipped my mind -- very sorry.
--
BTW:
Perhaps, commons-*** lines can be separated, by creating
/commons/binindex.cgi plus commons/sourceindex.cgi
and by adding these lines below to .htaccess in jakarta-site2
module (migrated into SVN?).
| RedirectMatch ^/site/binindex.cgi#commons-(.*) http://jakarta.apache.org/commons/binindex.cgi#$1
| RedirectMatch ^/site/sourceindex.cgi#commons-(.*) http://jakarta.apache.org/commons/sourceindex.cgi#$1
(... not sure. I am not familiar with RedirectMatch.)
Sincerely,
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