A pitfall that I'd like us to avoid is the one that assumes that every piece of information of interested must be only a single click away. That might have been true in 1994 because of typical network speeds. But that's not reality today. The site as it sits today is laid out with what I think is a reasonable assumption: that visitors will enter through the home page and are visiting with intent. I don't tend to visit a software project's website and just poke around to see what I can see. I come looking for docs, or for help/support, or for a new release, or for something else. I believe others do the same. So it's okay if our homepage and left-nav serve only the purpose of triaging site visitors based on what they are looking for in general, and then other pages serve up the specifics. These are (some of) the design philosophies behind what you see today.
I really, really don't want to put any links in the left-nav proper to
destinations that don't carry that menu. I cannot stress this enough. A
site visitor should reasonably expect that the menu that helps him or her
get around the site also keeps them "on the (branded) site". And as I've
mentioned in other discussions, HACKING is far too lengthy a document to be
considered "part of the website", in much the same way that "Version Control
with Subversion" is.
That said, I agree that the Documentation page is not the best way to slice
that information. I totally "get" how the most common class of site visitor
would assume a set of contents there that aren't. So I like some the
suggestions here.
Would could physically move the Release Notes section into a new
docs/release-notes/index.html, expand that simple list of links a bit to
mention (in a non-detailed way) the "big highlights" of each release ("file
locking", "merge tracking", "tree conflicts detection", etc.), and link to
it in the left-nav in the manner you describe.
I'd suggest moving the C API docs, JavaHL doc, and HACKING link to the (new)
Developer Resources page.
That really only leaves the "Version Control with Subversion" link to deal
with. I have a semi-obnoxious suggestion here that satisfies my strong
left-nav opinions: put a thumbnail of the book at the bottom of the
left-nav menu which links to svnbook.org.
I'd also suggest simply renaming the "Getting Involved" link to just
"Contributing" (as opposed to adding another separate link for "Contributing
Code"). As you can tell by the physical name of that page
(contributing.html), that's the title I really think it should have anyway.
Justin Erenkrantz wrote:
> As I mentioned before, I think we can do some things to make the
> sidebars a little more useful to developers and users too.
>
> Here's a few suggestions - lemme know what you think:
>
> - I think "Documentation" page is a bit misleading. I think it'd be
> best if that just points straight to the user manuals. What about
> "Docs (SVN Book)"? I feel that most people who are looking for
> documentation are going to be actually looking for "how do I run SVN"
> - not "how do I contribute". I *never* would have thought that
> HACKING (or API docs or...) was under there. As for the other content
> sitting on /docs/...
>
> - I would add "Release Notes" under "Getting Subversion" - I know many
> people want to just know what changed and I think giving a quick link
> would be very helpful!
>
> - As for API docs, it's sort of the odd man out. A few thoughts -
> maybe svnbook should point at it too? What do you think?
>
> - I like the term "Community", but wonder if that's slightly
> misleading. What if we made the heading a link to the "Community
> Guide"? Or, "Community (Guide)" with (Guide) being the link?
>
> - I agree that it's important to have "mailing lists" and "issue
> tracker" on the sidebar. But, it's..."Getting Involved"...hmm...what
> if we added a link to the sidebar called "Contributing Code"? I like
> that part of the "Getting Involved" page and would be nice to stress
> that, IMO.
>
> WDYT? -- justin
--
C. Michael Pilato <cmpil...@collab.net>
CollabNet <> www.collab.net <> Distributed Development On Demand
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