On 23 November 2012 23:31, Rob Weir <robw...@apache.org> wrote: > On Fri, Nov 23, 2012 at 4:54 PM, Juergen Schmidt <jogischm...@gmail.com> > wrote: > > > > Am Freitag, 23. November 2012 um 18:26 schrieb Rob Weir: > >> Currently our website has a header, controlled by > >> ooo-site/brand.mdtext, that we use to promote special events and > >> announcements. This header shows up on every page on the website, > >> except for wiki and other non-static web pages. > >> > >> This header is our single most effective way to promote things. It > >> gets 750K+ views per day. This is far more than our blog, Twitter, > >> mailing lists, Facebook, etc., combined. > >> > >> However, this position currently can carry only a single message at a > >> time. So when we have several messages in quick succession, we need > >> to halt the old announcement and replace it with a new one. For > >> example, when I added the marketing volunteers, I had to stop the call > >> for QA volunteers. Juergen has a call for translators coming, and > >> that will likely cause us to halt the marketing call for volunteers. > >> And we want to put up a FOSDEM call for papers soon as well. > >> > >> So the way we're using this it is all or nothing. A message either > >> gets 750K views a day or it gets nothing. > >> > >> I think this is not optimal. It is natural for us to have several > >> ongoing promotions, and it would be sufficient if we could more > >> effectively share that space. > >> > >> One idea might be to not have a static message in brand.mdtext, but > >> encode several messages in a Javascript file, a JSON object that lists > >> all the current messages along with their weighting. Then we could > >> have our website header show a random message, respecting the weights. > >> A high weighted message would get more views than a lower weighted > >> one. But even 10% of 750K is a lot more views that our blog will > >> receive. > >> > >> Does this make sense? > > for me it makes a lot of sense and we try to use the page hits in the > most efficient way. > >> > >> Any other ideas? Any ideas on how to implement this? > >> > >> Another idea is to allow graphical as well as the current text-only > >> promotions. A banner graphic can be even more effective. > >> > >> > > > > no real idea how we can achieve it, the CMS is limited as far as I > understood but Joe is probably open for improvements. I am a poor web > developer ;-) > > > > We don't have PHP at runtime, but we do have perl at page build time, > e.g.,: > https://svn.apache.org/repos/asf/incubator/ooo/ooo-site/trunk/lib/view.pm > > But hard-coding at build time doesn't give us rotation, unless we have > a cron job or something that marks all the files as dirty every 5 > minutes or so. I don't think we want that. > > It might be worth looking at how the ASF home page handles its > "featured projects": http://www.apache.org/ >
they use js, see http://www.apache.org/js/apache_boot.js (the text are li tags labelled with switch_1 / 2 / 3). > > Or we can just do with Javascript. It is easy enough to make the > experience for those without JS to be the same as what they see today, > a single hard-coded message. > We could do that, but we have to test it on a browser that blocks js on sites without certificate (apache.org has a certificate). > > -Rob > > > Juergen > >> > >> Regards, > >> > >> -Rob > > >
