[openbeos] Re: the new website

Hi Waldemar,

Waldemar Kornewald wrote: 
Just constructive feedback:

What is the difference between "Newsletter" and "Developer blog"? My
intention is to unify both into some kind of "article" which is
similar to a blog, but more professional and only Haiku-related.

The Development Blogs are like "online diaries" where the devs can post development stuff/rants/experiences at any time; it is more of a personal thing, and it is very dynamic. We could well also call this section "Devs Blogsphere" or "Devs Planet" (which is very much in vogue these days).

The newsletter is a less dynamic media that would be published periodically (on the web to start, potentially in print in the future) with mostly Haiku related articles contributed that can be technical or otherwise in nature. Think of it more like a magazine.

I agree with Download being better than "Get Haiku". I just didn't
like having three items in the menu starting with a "D", but it
doesn't look bad.


Good that we agree! :-)

I don't like pointing to the community wiki to have another parallel
world in the official site. What do you want to put there, anyway?
Maybe community projects? Hmm, those will probably want to have their
own website, anyway. We could link to those projects from the official
site like we already do now (it's a little bit hidden in the totally
unfinished "Collaborate" section...).
The wiki might be good as a tool for the documentation team. Maybe we
could use Trac for this in order to reduce the number of tools (and
accounts). Trac even supports ReST with a plugin, but maybe it's not
as powerful as our current wiki. OTOH, I could enable the "book"
content type in Drupal and let everyone create content with a WYSIWYG
editor. The only problem is that all the content in our wiki or
website will not be exportable to PDF and other formats very easily.

The Community Wiki is a place where the community can contribute content. Your concern that it may create duplication and therefore confusion is valid, so perhaps we could simply limit the content; this could be handled by creating workspaces, such as the following:

- How To's
- Code snippets
- Guestbook
- Beta Docs

The "Beta Docs" deserves special mention; this could be like a "draft" workspace for community-contributed documentation that, after review (and changes if necessary), can be moved over the to Documentation area.

User blogs: I don't know how to do this with Drupal. We'd have to do
very ugly customizations and modify the internal DB schema to have a
special flag and modify the search feature. This is a lot of work just
to let everyone put his personal rant on the website. I also think
this will lead to confusion. People will start putting tutorials and
other important articles on their own blog instead of the official
Haiku "articles" section. Since we would have to (by default) separate
content to filter the user blogs from the rest of the web content you
could not reach important user-created content easily, anymore. IMHO,
we must prevent users from posting important material on their own
blog and I think that this cannot be done without completely moving
end-user blogs out of our site, so things gets very obvious.


I do not want ugly hacks, so we agree on that. :-)

I was thinking something along the lines of this:

http://drupal.org/handbook/modules/blog

I am not concerned about the content; it is a blog, where people can rant, and others can comment. It is more of a social thing.

I am sorry to say this, but IMHO, the only obviously useful item in
the "user" section is "forums". We should also explicitly point to the
"support forum".

No, it is not a support forum, unless you want to do customer service, that is. :-)

The *Community Forums* (with a special stress on *commnunity*) are another place for the community to exchange ideas, tips, or to simply socialize. It is for the community, and will not be confounded with anything official.

The word "user" has been omitted deliberately; our focus is to cater to developers for now. The time will come when we have to think about users, but not yet.

This separation would allow marketing to manage the message to the
outside world, the devs to freely produce all the technical
documentation that is is required, and the community to have a place to
express itself and feel part of the project.


I don't like that you want to separate marketing from the rest of the
team. While we're not experienced and you're the one who knows
marketing best I see no need to separate everything so strictly and
even give people different levels of access. I mean, if you look at it
in detail you will notice that your "marketing" section will contain
content that is largely produced or "initiated" by the developers. The
marketing team would only take care of articulating our goals and what
Haiku is (in "About") and writing good news items in the name of the
developers and other team members. We can easily handle this without
any separation.


Well, it is a matter of being practical, and maximizing efforts.

Would you give me access to change code in the repository? You would not (for a good reasons), and I would not expect you to. I trust the good judgment of the developers, and if at anytime I notice something from the POV of the user, I point it out to the devs (informally or by reporting a bug), and the devs take care of (or not). I do not see why it should not be the same with marketing.

Haiku is composed of teams (development, marcom, etc.) that work together for a common goal. The devs focus on the code, we at marcom will focus on how to market the ideas (and eventually the product) of Haiku best. Teams communicate, discuss and coordinate (this is what the admin meetings should be for). We can also disagree. But in the end, we should trust each other's good judgment in each particular area of competence. Trying to subordinate any function to the another (which is what you seem to be implying) will only work for one side, but not the other, and in the end for nobody.

The content that would be under the marketing umbrella is the following:

- Front page
- About (which includes FAQ)
- News & Events
- Newsletter

Tell me, which of the above is largely produced and/or initiated by the devs?


    * What is Haiku
    * Haiku Tour (screenshots or videos)
    * FAQ
    * Teams
    * Sponsors

- About

Is the internal team structure really of any interest to end-users?
We don't have sponsors, yet, but I hope that this will change. :)

It is important that people beyond the small circle of Haiku fans start knowing who are the individuals behind Haiku. In the long term, it produces recognition and value. Just to give you a practical example, if Haiku decided to participate in at conference in, say, Japan, and Axel were to give a presentation, the attendance that you can expect could heavily vary depending on whether people know who Axel is or not. Making the individuals known also open up editorial opportunities, something that will be very valuable for Haiku being that we do not have the $$$ resources to pay for advertising.

With regards to sponsors, yes we do have. There are companies/devs that contribute a portion of their sales to Haiku; they deserve some form of recognition. We have some sponsors in the pipeline too (nothing to get excited about). And we want to find more sponsors, so we need a page to specifically appeal to them.


    * Latest news
    * News archive
    * WalterCon

- News & Events

Why do we need to have a separate news archive and "latest news"?
Does WalterCon really need its own entry? It only happens once per
year. Most of the time it's completely useless, so it could be moved
into some less obvious place and the front page could link to it
directly when there actually is WalterCon (we can have 'sticky' news
items which are always at the top).

The news is the conduit for official/formal announcements/communication with the public (Haiku fans + the rest of the world). As the number of news items builds up, it is very convenient to have the news archived by topic, month, and even years. It makes it extremely to find what you are looking for. Something along the lines of this:

http://haikunews.org/archive/

WalterCon DEFINITELY needs its own entry! WalterCon is great opportunity that we have to exploit more, and the way to do that is to have a place where you can always find information about the event, present, past and future. Not only would we use it to inform of future events, but also to archive information about the events that happened in the past, and provide some of the content for download (pictures, videos, etc.). In the future, we may even look into how to automate some of the logistics to organize the show, such as allowing donations specific to WalterCon, and having a payment mechanism for the attendants. Last but not least, WalterCon has sponsors, and this is where they will get the recognition for supporting the event.


- Development (as is + Documentation)

What about end-user documentation?

We are not addressing end users deliberately, as our key targets right now are developers. Provisions will be made for user documentation for when Haiku 1.0 is released.


- Community

    * Forums
    * Wiki
    * User Blogs


I only see forums as being important enough (see above).
Also, we need a section that targets companies and people creating
distributions. I don't want to have this Linux mess where we have 1000
different distributions and none of them being compatible with each
other or having ridiculous UI standards, etc. There should be
officially supported (certified?) distributions and rules to follow.
This can probably only be enforced for commercial distributions, but
even those will need information about what a distribution should
have. That section should also attract commercial support and
collaboration (that's why I called it "Collaborate", but there could
be a better name for it). BTW, even the "Sponsors" page could move
into this section, but it might still be good to show it in "About"
because end-users will have more trust in Haiku if we have sponsors
behind us.

"Collaborate" sounds more like a community oriented place, but terminology aside, I have no clue what the plans are for certification (if any), so I cannot comment intelligently on the subject. If the certification process has been defined, and whatever guidelines/specs need to be met have been documented, then you may need a place for this information; if nothing is defined and there is no documented guidelines/specs, then I don't see the point to this page.


- Download

    * Haiku images
    * Development tools
    * Anything else that would be of use to devs?

The common menu on the right top (next to Search), could be:

Good idea, showing development tools in the download section is useful
ATM (later we'll ship everything with Haiku, anyway).


Great!


- Report Bugs

- Contact

What about "Donate"?

Good question. I want this to be more prominent than it is now. Perhaps a colorful donate button that could possibly be placed on the right column of all the relevant pages.

http://www.zeta-zone.net/haiku/forums_mockup.jpg 

Very nice mockup. I really like the look. Simple, but good. It might
just take much work to get a good multi-lingual site (and maintain our
Drupal customizations; esp. for security fixes updates must happen
very quickly).

Localization of the website has been identified as one of the marcom goals, so it will be addressed in the future. I plan to have discussions with the people in the various countries to try to figure out what would be the best way to implement a *viable* and *sustainable* solution. It will be a collaborative effort.

to our current goals. There needs to be more visual elements that lead
to the key pieces of information that are important for our audience
(the developers). We also need a "Highlights" box or block where we can
expose events/milestones that are relevant at any given time (for
example, we could have a "Come to WalterCon" visual element, with a link
to the WalterCon page. I will try to put together a mockup for later
today or tomorrow (Waldemar, can static information be added to the
front page?)

The front page is also key, and I think that it needs to be repurposed

Yes, special elements like "Come to WalterCon" should be shown. The
front page can be fully customized with HTML and PHP. It's a special
element.


OK, good to know.

with :-) since last week; that one is more far reaching and it is not
done yet (and on hold for now).

BTW, this is not the conceptual proposal that I have been threatening

This is at least much better than having *nothing* to work with. I
like progressing in quick steps more than having to wait and doing
nothing.

Sorry, but my goal is not to keep people busy, but to try to make things better. But I understand your frustration. :-)

Cheers!

Koki


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