Will do - not that I have much thought-wise yet. I also think the
current website and structure is not terrible; so to solve the
complaints we need to understand why people are complaining.

Some more thoughts....

.... Go to maven.apache.org. Minor irritation - the visited links are
the same colour as the text.

... Good first paragraph. Describes the product, teaches POM acronym
immediately. Succint.

... Wording on next paragraph is bad. "If you think". A newcomer who
is asking 'What is Maven' is not thinking that it can help, they're
just thinking wtf is this thing I've been hearing about. Good content
here though, though the FAQ is bad. It doesn't contain what this says
it contains.

ITEM: Kill this FAQ. Remove navlink and move FAQ entries to a wiki
FAQ. [Warning: I believe wikis are good for drafting documentation and
managing wikis, rather than hosting official documentation :) Plus
wiki's need editors. ]

... Next section on front page is basically the documentation home
page. I like that there is a 'Run Maven' section, that's good. My
temptation is to move this to its own page, include a small number of
subsections under each of the 5, but have many more subsections for
the user-centric ones than the committer-centric.

... Off topic... Need to delete the apachecon eu links to the talks
being given there. Also the 'documentation' under Maven Ant tasks is
rather lonely and odd looking.

... Documentation index section could wrap into the documentation
page. It seems rather unuseful though. I've clicked on it before and
immediately clicked off.

... Plugins list. Good I guess. I mean I asked for such a thing in my
reply to Brett; though I was thinking more of a wiki one where all the
3rd party plugins were listed too
(http://docs.codehaus.org/display/MAVENUSER/MavenPlugins I guess).

... Random thought. I wonder if the repository should be a separate
subproject of Maven. ie) own mailing list, and the various bits of
repository information that are on the website could be collated into
a single small set of pages. Seems that every now and then I come
across a snippet relating to that.

... Minor. Rename 'Getting Support' in navbar to 'Mailing lists'.

... Subprojects get shortchanged on the website. Hidden away in the
bottom left. I'd be tempted to use the space saved by a documentation
page to have a table showing the subprojects that explains what they
are (yeah I know, like on the bottom of jakarta.apache.org where no
one looks... I'm reverting to comfort).

... Maven Ant tasks documentation doesn't seem to be a part of the
other documentation blobs; just a link on the right.

... Sonatype book not on the 3rd party resources yet.

... Could also treat Maven Plugins as a subproject [at least website
wise; not implying independent mailing lists etc when I say this].
Anything to simplify the navbars really.

... Powered by link is useless in my opinion. Make this a bit of blurb
on the About Maven other pages; maybe at the bottom of Features. It's
impossible to keep up with the list (which is great as it shows
success), so just make it blurb that says "Did you know Maven2 powers
these projects?". Let's update it to have better names.

... Personally I'd like to see Ivy mentioned somewhere. Maybe on an
expanded Maven Ant Tasks page.

... There's no IDEA integration for Maven? Given the shortness of
these pages; I would merge into a single page on IDE Integration and
drop the navbar menu. Include the latest on IDEA. Possibly put under
the About Maven section.

... Drop the Maven 1 information from the 3rd party section. That can
live on the Maven 1.x pages. External Resource pages always seem to be
a good idea for wikis, it lets the authors add them rather than
committers.

... ApacheCon banner looks crap. Looks like there's space for two ads
there but only one showing.

Okay... sorry that was more website than documentation focused. Helped
me get a good feel for the site and hopefully had some value.

Hen

On 5/25/07, Jason van Zyl <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Hen,

How about doing mockups in the wiki? Of the actual layout, then
people can tool around and you can flesh out what you're thinking.

On 25 May 07, at 2:02 PM 25 May 07, Henri Yandell wrote:

> I didn't notice any threads on the doc organization topic, so thought
> I'd start one. Apologies if I missed the right place, [EMAIL PROTECTED] is the
> noisiest list I'm on.
>
> Compare and contrast:
>
> http://maven.apache.org/guides/
>
> and
>
> http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.2/
>
> ---
>
> Firstly, there is no real Maven documentation home page. It's a part
> of the front page, which clashes with the sheer amount of space that
> news, announcement and other things need. So suggested step 1: We need
> a documentation page.
>
> Secondly, it's obvious that much of the httpd page concerns mod_foos
> that are included by default. With Maven, these plugin documentation
> pages are _much_ harder to find. They're not even listed under
> documentation but involve you having to know that you want to use a
> plugin and then go look at its docs. So suggested step 2: Plugin
> documentation needs to be folded into main documentation.
>
> Will add more as I go; I need to dig through the wiki sprawl to
> understand how this is being solved; I'm sure the above isn't news.
>
> Hen
>
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>
>

Thanks,

Jason

----------------------------------------------------------
Jason van Zyl
Founder and PMC Chair, Apache Maven
jason at sonatype dot com
----------------------------------------------------------




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