On 12/04/08 05:50, Blake wrote:
> That's a very legitimate point, Calum.  I guess the root of the 
> problems is that .org provides a lot of information on a single, 
> rather daunting page.  .com provides a lot of info well, but has a 
> nice tree-style navigation layout that starts with a simple home/root 
> page.  Maybe we just need to get the .org site to follow those good 
> design principles a little more.  I know that even for me, an 
> OpenSolaris user since the early days of the project, the .org site 
> can be a little thick when it comes to finding what I need.
>
> cheers,
> Blake

Hi Blake,

Thanks for this feedback. Any way you want to participate is welcome. 
OpenSolaris.org is ~6K pages of content (not including ARC case files) 
with 9 subsite zones, so your help is appreciated!
The plan is to start migrating to new infrastructure fairly soon.

 That new infrastructure is Xwiki, so it lends itself toward a very wide 
architecture and arbitrarily deep. http://www.xwiki.org provides a nice 
playground, so if you want to prototype ideas and send them along, I'd 
be grateful for your help to explore a future architecture that is more 
sane for all types of users.

As a start, I've put together an information architecture document that 
outlines one method of organizing the content: 
http://opensolaris.org/os/project/website/content/info_arch.pdf

So, for example, we'd have just one menu at the top, something like the 
following
opensolaris.org/xwiki/bin/view/Main/About
opensolaris.org/xwiki/bin/view/Main/Groups
opensolaris.org/xwiki/bin/view/Main/Downloads
opensolaris.org/xwiki/bin/view/Main/Documentation
opensolaris.org/xwiki/bin/view/Main/Messages

Then, for example, the Groups page above would have some general content 
about OSOL Groups and pointers to spaces for each type, as follows
opensolaris.org/xwiki/bin/view/Main/Projects
opensolaris.org/xwiki/bin/view/Main/UserGroups
opensolaris.org/xwiki/bin/view/Main/Communities

Then, the Projects page could have general content for Projects and 
sub-pages with details
opensolaris.org/xwiki/bin/view/Main/Projects/Creating
opensolaris.org/xwiki/bin/view/Main/Projects/Creating#instantiation
opensolaris.org/xwiki/bin/view/Main/Projects/Creating#bestpractices
opensolaris.org/xwiki/bin/view/Main/Projects/Contributing
opensolaris.org/xwiki/bin/view/Main/Projects/Contributing#patches
opensolaris.org/xwiki/bin/view/Main/Projects/Contributing#translations
opensolaris.org/xwiki/bin/view/Main/Projects/SourceControl
opensolaris.org/xwiki/bin/view/Main/Projects/SourceControl#mercurial
opensolaris.org/xwiki/bin/view/Main/Projects/SourceControl#subversion

At this level, for example, we can specify 'in page' navigation, so you 
can jump from the top of the SourceControl page down to the Mercurial 
section. And, we'd also be able to have several sections of 'panel' 
navigation, beyond the general menu that links back to About, Groups, 
Documentation, Downloads, and Messages. This is good, because we can 
share additional navigation panels across Projects without those panels 
appearing at the Main level. And readers can collapse the panels they 
don't use.

Going further _across_ the rabbit hole, for example, I think (Chris and 
Alan correct me if I'm wrong about this) we'd have
opensolaris.org/xwiki/bin/view/Main/pkg
opensolaris.org/xwiki/bin/view/Main/svosug
opensolaris.org/xwiki/bin/view/Main/ogb
etc...

This is all of course a WIP, so any comments and thoughts about how to 
organize to our best advantage are welcomed. Now is a very good time to 
talk about this and do some work on templates.

Regards,
Michelle


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