Benoit St-Pierre wrote:
Hi!
> I agree that the help and the tutorial are more important.
> In fact, I think that once the tutorial is in place, there
> is no need to maintain html help files.
Are they maintained at the moment at all? I admit that I
only took care about the online help. <confused> Pascal,
what's the state here?
> There is no dillemma between rebuilding the site and
> creating the tutorial. A webpage is more than a bunch of
> linked pages : it's an information architecture.
Hm, well, huge words. I'm pretty simple minded. A web page
is it's content. Whether it is fancy or not is a second
order problem. E.g. most blogs and web forums out there have
a pretty nice design. But if you switch them off entirely,
the internet will not loose any information. (In fact I feel
it will get much easier to find information again, if one
switches them all off. But that's my personal opinion.)
Having said that, I'd first take care about the content,
then how to maintain it, and have a look what is the easiest
way to do this in a non-profit-sparetime project. (No, I
think Typo3 is not suitable at all. ;) Plus, for me
providing tons of content in the best design ever that is
entirely outdated and can not be managed on our basis of
work is worthless. Rather have a smaller amount that is on
in a current and valid state and refer the user to the
online help, that is also in a current and valid state.
> Before creating a link to a page, I must make sure that :
> the page exists and that it satisfies the reason why I am
> linking to it.
This is a pretty "IT professional" point of view. I'd prefer
a more "practical" one. Not that I like 404, but keep it
simple ;) A web page is a page of text in the first place.
And its worth is the text (or more broadly spoke, the
information).
> So what exactly _is_ Scid ? What are its main features ?
> This is not just marketing stuff. This is important for
> the tutorial, the main page, the fast intro, the Wikipedia
> entry, etc.
Ahm, what about a nice entry page that links to a completed
tutorial, where the latter starts with some real world
examples "what I always wanted to do and never dared to
ask". ;)
I could imagine a hand full of pages to be sufficient.
Entry containing also recent news, (recent) Screenshots,
Tutorial, Download.
> To use terms in a consistent way, we must take care of
> them right at the beginning. We must decide what terms to
> describe the toolkit.
>
> (I imagine that Scid is a toolkit, for now, It could also
> be a _suite_, but that sounds too much like
> corporate-talk. What exactly is Scid ?)
Ahm, most people "out there in the wild" would call it a
"chess program", I think. At least they refer to it that way
if they ask me about it.
> The time-frame I set myself included the tutorial, btw.
> Scid's website is at most ten pages deep : no terrifying
> depth there. It's not that deep that I should not work on
> the HTML templates first.
I mean, do it as you prefer. But, keep in mind (IMHO a very
important point) that in some years you may not have the
time to continue it, therefore it must be in a state that
another one could take over, so keep it simple from a
technical point of view. Keep the information that needs
updates to a minimum, IF these information is not generated
from the online help or other docs that gets updated
_anyway_ in the development process.
And another IMHO very important point: don't open to much
construction sites with unfinished parts. I'd suggest to
change small parts and finish them, then take the next part
and finish that one. And so on.
> The actual HTML template does need repairs. We don't
> create tables to insert navigation anymore.
Well, no objection against barrier free pages, but
concerning the Scid page and documentation(!!!), the tables
for the menues are really the least of the problems... ;)
I still feel that documentation/web wise the most important
thing to do would be to go over all current help pages
(refering to the online help) and check them for
correctness, validity and agreement with the current
version, plus _add_ all things that are not yet documented
at all and extend those parts that are documented only
rudimentary.
I think the priority should be to get a decent tutorial for
new users and to get the docs right. Then one could think of
design issues like removing table-based menues. Actually,
one of the ideas to use something like a wiki is, that one
does not take care about such things in these frameworks at
all. The design is really a second order problem.
Just my personal thoughts.
--
Kind regards, / War is Peace.
| Freedom is Slavery.
Alexander Wagner | Ignorance is Strength.
|
| Theory : G. Orwell, "1984"
/ In practice: USA, since 2001
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
This SF.Net email is sponsored by the Moblin Your Move Developer's challenge
Build the coolest Linux based applications with Moblin SDK & win great prizes
Grand prize is a trip for two to an Open Source event anywhere in the world
http://moblin-contest.org/redirect.php?banner_id=100&url=/
_______________________________________________
Scid-users mailing list
[email protected]
https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/scid-users
