On 8/23/07, Sham Chukoury <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > On 23/08/2007, at 10:38PM, Sébastien Cevey wrote: > > > I think that separating dev and user websites is a good idea. Most > > other projects do it that way, and it seems to work fine. > > I agree. I used to be of the opinion that having a user-oriented > site, as well as a developer oriented site, would result in too much > maintenance work. Having now largely taken a break from XMMS2 for a > while, I can see that it makes sense to have this different > branding.. Besides, the content on the wiki didn't seem to change all > that much while I've been inactive on it, so it looks like it won't > be much extra work maintaining 2 sub sites (essentially). In the end, > it makes sense to have a certain distinction between users and > developers, because they're different audiences. XMMS2 being an open > source project, there is a degree of overlap between the two groups, > but we should bear these points in mind: > > - GSoC 2006 taught us that community was important in an open source > project. Among other things, for an open source software project to > thrive, it needs to be able to attract new users to the community, as > well as being able to keep them. Therefore, it makes sense to have a > site aimed at attracting and informing new and current users. > - The long term viability of any open source project is related to > its ability to not just attract users, but also developers. While > some open source projects seem to directly engage people who are > already professional or otherwise experienced software developers, > XMMS2 seems to appeal to those mostly in and around the 'college/ > university student' demographic. I think there are some reasons for > this particular situation... Music players have been done to death > over the past decade - most hardcore coders aren't really interested > in this anymore. The 'college/university student' types are likely to > be the kind of people who do have an active interest (as well as > time!) in discovering, collecting and listening to new music. > Conversely, since music players have been done to death, relatively > new programmers can quickly learn from the vast pool of knowledge > accumulated by others over the past decade. But this is digressing > almost into another post.. The point is that XMMS2 has a strong > appeal to relatively new programmers interested in exploring new ways > of experiencing their music collection. This has been quite well > reinforced by XMMS2's participation in Google's Summer of Code over > the past 2 years. Therefore, there is a certain culture of education > around XMMS2, where newbie programmers join up and help where they > can, and progressively grow their own skills while helping the > project. This can be represented in the site design by providing > steps for, and encouraging, users to gradually become more involved > as developers. (thus reinforcing the overlap between users and > developers typically found in open source projects) > > > The user side should be straightforward, catchy, and it should give a > > good idea of what XMMS2 is and why anyone would want to use it. It's > > not a trivial thing to do, as it will require us to clearly highlight > > what XMMS2 strengths are for a user, and how to explain it in simple > > terms. The sections and pages should be few, simple and to the point. > > And sexy! :-) > > > > The link to the developer side should be easy to find, but indeed, the > > whole developer site could be dissociated entirely; different design, > > possibly different subdomain, more wiki features exposed. It could > > probably be less rigid, but if we can keep some order and hierarchy, > > it would be nice. > > I think the challenge would be in structuring the information in such > a way as to minimise duplication between the user facing side and the > developer facing side, since duplication would simply add to the > maintenance workload. One thing I'm thinking we might be able to do > is basically to still use mediawiki, but more in a CMS type role.. > That is, the content still goes into a single wiki, but the styling > and functionality are different based on which subdomain or section > of the site you're viewing. > > Cheers. > -S > > > > -- > _______________________________________________ > Xmms2-devel mailing list > [email protected] > http://lists.xmms.se/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/xmms2-devel >
For once, I'm in good agreement with you and Sébastien. One thing I would like to address, though, is that you mention that maintenance difficulty worried you before, but you don't really offer a solution to it. And you also mentioned since you haven't been maintaining the wiki, little has been updated. Perhaps that's *because* you haven't been maintaining it, rather than because of a lack of new information. I have to get to work now, but I have some ideas to get us started which I'll post in a minute. -- Dan Chokola -- _______________________________________________ Xmms2-devel mailing list [email protected] http://lists.xmms.se/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/xmms2-devel
