[openbeos] Re: the new website
- From: "Rob Tijssen" <rob.tijssen@xxxxxxx>
- To: <openbeos@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Sat, 26 Aug 2006 01:47:00 +0200
What about "User documentation" ?
Or did I miss reading that?
Greets, Rob
-----Oorspronkelijk bericht-----
Van: openbeos-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:openbeos-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx]
Namens Waldemar Kornewald
Verzonden: zaterdag 26 augustus 2006 0:41
Aan: openbeos@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Onderwerp: [openbeos] Re: the new website
On 8/25/06, Jorge G. Mare (a.k.a. Koki) <koki@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> 1) Marketing
>
> - Front page
> - About (which includes FAQ)
> - News & Events
> - Newsletter
>
> 2) Engineering
>
> - Download (instead of "Get Haiku")
> - Documentation
> - Development
> - Developer's blogs
>
> 3) Community
>
> - Forums
> - Community Wiki
> - User blogs
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.
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.
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.
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 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".
> 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.
> - About
>
> * What is Haiku
> * Haiku Tour (screenshots or videos)
> * FAQ
> * Teams
> * Sponsors
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. :)
> - News & Events
>
> * Latest news
> * News archive
> * WalterCon
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).
> - Development (as is + Documentation)
What about end-user documentation?
> - 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.
> The common menu on the right top (next to Search), could be:
>
> - Download
>
> * Haiku images
> * Development tools
> * Anything else that would be of use to devs?
Good idea, showing development tools in the download section is useful
ATM (later we'll ship everything with Haiku, anyway).
> - Report Bugs
>
> - Contact
What about "Donate"?
> 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).
> The front page is also key, and I think that it needs to be repurposed
> 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?)
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.
> BTW, this is not the conceptual proposal that I have been threatening
> with :-) since last week; that one is more far reaching and it is not
> done yet (and on hold for now).
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.
Thanks for your suggestions!
Bye,
Waldemar Kornewald
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