[Mono-list] Updating or Redoing go-mono.net

[Aaron Weber]

Hello all,

Miguel mentioned to me that we ought to update go-mono.net at some point. While at first the major site audience was people who wanted to contribute to Mono as a platform, now we have more kinds of people that we need to pay attention to:

* People contributing to the Mono platform
* C# developers who want to use Mono, ASP.NET, gtk#, and so forth, but don't want to contribute to the platform
* Power-users who want to use things written in C#, but aren't developers.

I think two or three things we can do.

The easiest is a simple content update, maybe with some re-organization. We'll make sure that info on use and installation is easy to find, clean up the directory structure into a few primary sections: news/about/general, platform development, programming with C#/Mono, and using Mono/C# software. This would be relatively simple but wouldn't solve any major structural issues with the site.

A more serious update would involve redoing the left-hand navigation and creating a real directory structure. Ideally, we should have a menu system that expands as you go down (see www.ximian.com), rather than a long list of items on the left side of the page. This would be great, but I probably don't have the autoconf/make/etc. skills to rewrite the site scripts.

Most ambitious would be to put the site entirely into ASP.NET, making it a showcase for Mono software. This would probably mean a ground-up redesign, and might as well include a new look to emphasize the difference. That would be really cool. I have no idea how advisable that is, though-- it could be a long project that would require resources better spent on developing mono and software for it.

a.