tl;dr Summary:
Looking for thoughts on the following topics, especially from our sponsors
and also across our entire community, users and developers alike:
- Apache Trafodion website content and structure - what's missing and
what's the best way to present it:
- Content for our Wiki versus the website: At this point, the wiki
content looks pretty thin, just a bit of getting started and news, pointing
mostly to the Apache website. What should we really have there while
remaining in alignment with Apache standards?
- How does the website get updated, and should we distinguish between
"latest stable build" and "daily build" content in our documentation where
divergence happens? How do other projects do this?
- Roberta and a few of us discussed doing a "practice" change to the
website as part of our release 1.2 build since the website hasn't been
updated since June (and we've made a lot of progress since then), while
pursuing the larger transition after this release. Is there a better
strategy?
- Other concerns and issues?
We're also looking at the websites for other projects that are incubating
or just past incubation to make sure we're going in the right direction..
We're looking at projects like calcite, brooklyn, sentry, aurora, falcon.
Are there others we should look at?
Extended discussion and pointers below.
Thanks!
-Carol P.
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For reference, these are the Jira links:
Summary: Transition content from Trafodion Wiki to Apache Trafodion Website
Key: TRAFODION-1507
URL: https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/TRAFODION-1507
Summary: Need to add build instructions to the the Apache Trafodion Website
Key: TRAFODION-1508
URL: https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/TRAFODION-1508
As part of the on-going process to migrate information and align our
operating procedures for podlings and planning for eventual transition to
TLP, we need to align the current site following the guidelines at
http://incubator.apache.org/guides/sites.html which include:
Creating A Good Podling Site
Apache Project Web Sites typically include several standard pages. Each
page is formatted with a navigation bar on the left and a project standard
header that includes the Incubator graphic.
The Web Site can be established during incubation, and migrated after
incubation to a permanent place in the TLP home.
- Project Home Page: the primary entry point to the site; contains
project description, news, invitation to join the project.
- License Page: usually, the Apache License 2.0
- Downloads: many projects in incubation will release code, and this
page describes them and has links to the download pages that redirect to
Apache Mirror sites.
- Documentation: this page describes the project documentation,
including javadoc for Java projects; guides, tutorials, and links to
external documentation.
- Committers: a list of current committers on the project.
- Mailing Lists: there are several mailing lists that the community
might be interested in, and this page contains mailto: links that
allow easy subscription (and unsubscription) to any of them.
- FAQ: frequently asked questions are answered here.
- Road Map: if the project has a vision of future community or
development activities, the road map is published here.
- Source Code: links to the browsable source repository and svn
commands to check out the sources.
- Coding Standards: the coding standards for submitted code by the
community, along with a description of how strict the project
intends to be.
- Issue Tracking: links to the JIRA or other issue tracking tool,
possibly including frequently used filters for issue lists.
- Dependencies: other projects that this project depends on.
- favicon: the project's icon in a format suitable for a browser's
address bar. If absent, an Apache Feather will be displayed.
This is most of the content on the existing Wiki, including doing any
remaining navigation from the previous trafodion.org website. That's
covered in Jira 1507, and I wanted to start collecting the community
requirements and guidelines for this process. I'm thinking that this is
the time to examine how we build our website to make it easier for folks to
understand/contribute content, as well as to make it as frictionless as
possible for the users in our community to find the information they need.
This is really a good time to restructure and align this for our future
development based on what the community wants. So I'm collecting
requirements and other guidance here and can update the Jira as needed.
I'll make sure we keep folks posted and try it out so that we agree on what
we're doing. We need to understand what goes on the Wiki (which doesn't
require a committer to change) and what content should be on the Website
(which can only be updated by a committer, though as with other pieces
here, contributors are very welcome!).
One proposal is that the *Website* has the following content (high level
bullets):
- Overview of Apache Trafodion
- License information
- Release/Roadmap
- Intro/overview for the Code
- Issue tracking links
- Installation information
- Configuration information
- Manageability Information
- Contributors and Contributing
- Documentation
- Source repository Information
Other stuff??
On the Wiki, that leaves basically the following:
- Community news (e.g., Trafodion at Apache Con!) and links
- Getting started
- Tentative preliminary content for review?
One question that we've discussed on this is how the official website gets
maintained. Linking source changes to website commits means that the
website and software are more in sync. But if the website is updated
frequently, we can run into issues where what's on the website doesn't
match the latest stable release. Or should the latest stable info be
permanently visible, separate from the latest daily build information?
Separately, we need to practice updating the website as part of a release,
and after talking with Roberta, the build instructions for this release
were identified as a good candidate to work through the process. That's
Jira 1508.
