Re: Site structure redesign

From: Andrus Adamchik (andru..bjectstyle.org)
Date: Sat Sep 09 2006 - 09:47:17 EDT

  • Next message: Andrus Adamchik: "Re: Site structure redesign"

    On Sep 9, 2006, at 5:10 PM, Borut Bolčina wrote:
    > What is Community and its content?

    Mailing lists, info on how one can participate, how to submit bugs,
    some blurb about Apache, etc.

    > Development and Issue Tracking don't
    > belong there in my opinion because of their technical natures.

    > We will try to pick the option that has two different focuses - one
    > for
    > newbies and lurkers, the other for users and experts.

    The site is also used by Cayenne developers. The is a place where I
    go when I want access to SVN, bug tracker, road map, etc. I am a user
    too! :-)

    Of course we need to hide all this scary backend information from the
    regular users, but putting it under its own top-level menu is quite
    reasonable I think.

    > We will try to pick the option that has two different focuses - one
    > for
    > newbies and lurkers, the other for users and experts. That is why I
    > decided
    > to put shortcuts on the right, but as they are important to users
    > of Cayenne
    > framework because they are more frequently accessed, they are more
    > visually
    > exposed.

    As I said in my other message, what links are important depends on
    the user.

    > * Side menu - maybe each second-level page will have its own small
    >> side menu (if applicable), without duplicating the entire menu on
    >> every page?
    >
    >
    >
    > The navigation is driven by site content. I don't mean some dynamic
    > menus
    > here, just that the volume and data organization decides how the
    > menu should
    > look like (multilevel or not, duplicating or not, ...).

    +1 - essentially same thing that I was saying.

    > Here we come to some basic questions we must answer. What
    > technology we will
    > decide to use?

    I tried to separate the technology discussion from the site structure
    discussion, as I wanted to avoid "maven sucks" type of comments in
    this thread (oops, I just said it :-)), so let's discuss this in
    general terms, and start a different thread if we need to talk
    specifics.

    > Who will host it?

    Apache Software Foundation - there are no other options.

    > Will the site use some server side logic?

    There are two parts - static site that will have to be generated
    offline and Confluence Wiki. Offline process can have any logic we
    want it to have, but the output should be static HTML (possibly with
    JavaScript).

    > Who will take care of it?

    Same people who do it today - Cayenne community. I am trying to
    figure out some legal issues to allow wider participation (e.g. I
    think authorized non-committers should have the ability to submit
    content), but I also want to keep this discussion separate from the
    navigation design.

    > How will the content be updated?

    That's the sticky question. This is why we have Wiki.

    > Putting news on the front page is a BIG decision. Using RSS does
    > not prevent
    > news being old. [...] Of course it would be great if news section
    > was on the front page with one
    > news every week or so, but this won't happen in my opinion.

    I agree, but if it can be conditional (no news - no news section.
    site generation logic can be smart about that).

    > I am tutoring my coworker in Cayenne and one of his early remarks
    > was that
    > documentation was badly interconnected and structured.

    I agree, that's why we are having this discussion.

    > I mentioned that already by pointing out the Children section.

    This is a matter of updating the wiki and maybe creating a better
    Wiki template, not with the Wiki itself.

    > All the documentation should be on main site not on Wiki,

    We had main docs checked as XML to SVN before (and we still do for
    the few pages on the site). We switched to Wiki for the docs work to
    increase participation, and this actually happened (at least
    initially after the switch). This is our CMS, and I personally do not
    want to go back to the XML files for the book-like "guides". With
    Confluence auto-export plugin Wiki content looks no different from
    the rest of the static site (provided we create a matching template).
    Why do you think Wiki is the problem?

    BTW, geronimo project is a good example (they also have all docs on
    Wiki). There is a page that points to all documentation resources,
    while the resources themselves are Wiki based:

    http://geronimo.apache.org/documentation.html

    Andrus



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