[openbeos] Re: the new website

On 8/27/06, Jorge G. Mare (a.k.a. Koki) <koki@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: 
Stephan Assmus wrote:
> You guys keep discussing the idealistic way... what you seem to completely
> forget is that the new website was designed to fix a specific problem. And
> if your view on the new site would be fully implemented, we would have that
> same problem again/still! Which is that "official news letters" will be
> released once every three quarters of a year.


Stephan, could you please explain more detailed what is too idealistic
in my ideas? I thought that my plans were rather "minimalistic" to
make it easier for us to create content. If that is not the case I
want to fix it, so I need to know your what you are referring to,
exactly. I'd be thankful for your suggestions.

> There is your visions on the one side, but the real Haiku project (the
> people behind it with their limited resources) on the other side. Where is
> the content going to come from that goes into official news letters? Will
> you have three or four articles all at once every month? Our website is
> going to look _again_ like their is no progress.


Exactly.

With regards to where the material would come from, I envision many
opportunities for articles from people beyond the core developers (I
hope this is not a problem); the content will also go just beyond coding
(I hope this is not a problem either). Specifically, there is WalterCon
to report about; there can be interviews, so that the outside world
starts knowing a little bit about the people inside the Haiku project;
we will also pursue contributed articles; at some point in time, there
will be other Haiku-related projects (and hopefully products!) that we
can report on. I envision that we can have contributions from overseas
too, and/or report on regional events where Haiku takes place in one
form or another (like when JPBE.net had Haiku at the last Open Source
Conference in Tokyo).


I wanted to have all those items in the "articles" section and
additionally show the important end-user articles on the front page as
news items. I.e.: news doesn't mean that we should only post about new
Haiku releases. That would be much easier for people: One place for
everything and one place for filtered end-user content directly on the
front page. Very important information like the current Haiku release
or specials on upcoming events should be part of the front page, so
they are always visible.

I agree that you need to make the front page more appealing, so I
implemented a "Latest news" block for the front page's sidebar
(currently disabled) and I also installed the "Event" module and added
an "Upcoming events" block to the sidebar on the front page.
You can now start working on the front page. I think the best solution
is that you create a new "page" and use the WYSIWYG editor to design
everything the way you want. When you've finished we can make it to
the new front page.

Take a look at the Drupal site to get a rough idea of what I initially
had in mind for the front page:
http://drupal.org/
I know, you want something different (probably more like
http://postgresql.org), but I haven't yet seen a good website that had
an attractive front page (without news being primary content) and at
the same time doesn't simply get over-looked by users. For example, I
think that those "Shortcuts" on freebsd.org and postgresql.org are so
small that they get overlooked. Even the information about the latest
release on postgresql.org is so small that most people will probably
click on the "downloads" link in the navbar, instead. Then, the rest
of the information on those sites looks like it was added to fill the
front page with content.

Bye,
Waldemar Kornewald

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