Some time ago we had some discussion and proposals for a general "makeover" of the Apache UIMA website.
I've taken a crack at incorporating the suggestions from that discussion and some more recent discussions around "promoting" some things from the sandbox, and produced a new version of the website. Before I commit anything, I'd like to get some feedback and see if we have a general consensus sufficient to proceed with an SVN update for this. To enable this, I'll post the website (minus some of the huge things like javadocs and pdfs) on people.a.o/~schor/website-candidate. ------------------------------------- NOTE: People.a.o is scheduled to be ***down*** today from 4PM to 10PM for maintenance NOTE2: The download page depends on some cgi files, and doesn't "work" here, but please look at the approximate version by going to http://people.a.o/~schor/website-candidate/downloads.html ------------------------------------- The general form of the site still uses the same build procedure - running "anakia" against the same xxx.xml files. But I've moved the formating/styling for the most part out of anakia's vsl macros and into .css stylesheets; there's a new file holding the styles for the various parts. No Javascript is used. I've kept the left-hand navigation bar, as before, but re-organized it to put the most often wanted links more toward the top (e.g., "downloads" is the top link). And I've made some of the links at the top level (of nesting) where that seemed more appropriate. The color scheme was changed to fit the suggestions we got from an actual web designer who looked over our site. I'm not wedded to any particular color scheme, but thought something would be nice. These colors come from the uima logo. The logo at the top itself was redone to be more compact. Anakia has the ability to generate things from DOM trees - I used that to automate some parts of the web site generation. For instance, the News page has now just news items; the top "toc" set of links is generated from the items themselves. Likewise, the download page entries are generated from download specifications, which are located in the project.xml file. This makes updating the download pages easier and less error-prone. On the download page, I added (where appropriate) information about platform. For instance, there are a couple of components (the CAS Editor, and UIMACPP) that have binaries generated for particular platforms. The main page I reorganized - there's a high level "picture" of everything on the site, divided up into frameworks, components, and Infrastructure. These are all discussed on the main page. This was done in recognition that the project has grown beyond just a framework. Some other things: In addition to info on mailing lists, I added info on viewing these as forums and/or blogs. I added a site search capability at the top of each page, and put on the bottom a set of common links, including a new one to a "privacy policy" that was copied mostly from Jukka's version that was discussed on legal-discuss. I also put a contact-us link (sends mail to uima-dev). If no one objects, I'll push the commit button in 3 days, and we can then continuing "improving" our site, from this base. If someone has a better suggestion of how to accomplish this kind of update, please let me know. -Marshall
