On 11/23/11 5:55 PM, Kay Schenk wrote:
+1...all good, and something we had discussed early on.
However, as I work on porting legacy info over, I am wondering what to do
about the more "developer" centered areas of the site: api, sc, sw,
framework, external (? -- I need to look at this one), tools,porting, and
many others that are not really "user centered". I will load these into the
ooo-site tree, but at some point, someone on the "developer" side should
really cull this out and move them to the "developer" side so we don't
continually deal with these areas on the "user portal".
i also have thought about the api page and i would like to support it
in the future as well. Because it provides some useful stuff for macro,
extension developers. But maybe in a simplified and reduced form.
things i would i would like to keep
- API reference
- C++/Java UNO Runtime reference
- search features into the different reference documentation as well as
the Developer's Guide
- links to the SDK
- link to the API wiki pages
Most of the content will i move into the wiki as soon as possible.
I would really like to work with you or somebody else who knows the
Apache framework better then i to rework the API page.
It would be really helpful if we can find an easy way to update the
generated reference docu without checking in thousands of files.
extensions.openoffice.org points today already in the wiki and i would
like to redirect this page today to the api side. And in the future we
can hopefully reactivate this page for an extension repository.
And hopefully templates.openoffice.org for templates ;-)
Juergen
On Mon, Nov 21, 2011 at 3:46 PM, Rob Weir<[email protected]> wrote:
We have with this project something that most other Apache projects
don't have and which the legacy OOo project never had. We have two
independent websites.
We have the legacy www.openoffice.org website, which served as an
end-user portal for OpenOffice as well as a website for project
participants.
And we have the http://incubator.apache.org/openofficeorg/, which on
graduation probably becomes something shorter, like
http://openoffice.apache.org. For most Apache projects their website
also serves both purposes: a site for users as well as project
participants.
So, we have both of these websites, and a lot of redundancy caused by
it. This obviously has a downside. It makes it hard to update, since
a lot of information is in both places. And it confuses users since
the websites are out of sync on some important topics. It also
prevents us from really optimizing the experience for each audience.
I suspect that long-term this dual-website with overlapping content is
not a maintainable model.
What can we do?
I hope I am not committing heresy if I say that most users of
OpenOffice care as little about Apache as drinker of a Pepsi cares
about the Board of Directors of PepsiCo Corporation. The average user
(and we're talking about millions of them) cares about downloading,
installing, using, learning about and generally being productive with
OpenOffice. It is a tool they use to do their work. Their work is
what matters to them, not our work.
But of course we also have a growing number of users, contributors and
committers who want to get more involved with the project. OpenOffice
is interesting to them. They identify with it. They want to learn
more than just the basics. They are intrigued by open source. They
want to help. They want to get more involved.
The trick I think, is to have websites that speak to each of these
audiences, as well as an easy/obvious way to navigate between them,
while at the same time avoiding unnecessary cross talk and redundancy.
For example, could we have something like this:
1) www.openoffice.org is the website for the OpenOffice product. It
is the end user site, focused on their interactions with the product.
So download, help, extensions, support. It is not how they interact
with the project. It serves the narrow focus on the product.
2) incubator.apache.org/openofficeorg (eventually
openoffice.apache.org) on the other hand is where the project members
work and where the public (includiing users) interacts with the
project. Not the product, but the project.
This dual website is quite commonly used for managing large and
important brands. For example, the consumer, when interfacting with
the brand Pepsi and Pepsi products goes to:
http://www.pepsi.com
But the person who wants to learn more about the company goes to another
URL:
http://www.pepsico.com/
Navigating between then is possible via a link on the page footer.
But generally each site is optimized for its target audience.
