Christian--
I didn't mean that than an OOo contributing page should emulate
*exactly* what NetBeans has. It's just that I found after doing just a
bit of navigating towards contributing/projects yesterday, I found the
whole process rather circuitous and confusing. Yes, the one servlet
display is all we have but it could be utilized differently.
I will work on this and post something soon. You can critique it then.
Really I am NOT into specifics (as yet). Currently I'm trying to get my
head around what might work from a larger informational/navigational
perspective. More later when I have more time.
Christian Lohmaier wrote:
Hi Kay,
On Mon, Nov 27, 2006 at 12:00:15PM -0800, Kay Schenk wrote:
I realize I am coming VERY late to this whole discussion [...]
You're not late, it is hard to keep up with it...
My feeling about the current 'Project' tab is that, indeed it is not
very useful to new visitors. It goes into way too much detail about the
various categorizations of projects to begin with before you even get to
a list, which, again, is not the best when it comes to describing really
what each of the projects is about or encompasses.
I agree.
Maybe we could come up with a new design for this page? I realize that
some of what we've got going on makes use of the handy dandy servlet
capability of SourceCast, so I don't know how much of what I'm
suggesting can be readily used.
Huh? Where is some servlet stuff being used? The only servlet stuff wrt
the project list is some boring listing:
http://www.openoffice.org/servlets/ProjectList
The problem is that we *don't* have any nifty scripting available. And
the ones used on SourceCast (that is now called CollabNet Enterprise
Edition) don't help...
Just to give you some ideas. Take a look at the NetBeans Contributing
page (this is just the first one I thought about and not necessarily the
best)
http://www.netbeans.org/community/contribute/
I think we have a neat contributing page as well:
http://contributing.openoffice.org/index.html
It goes into a nice friendly explanation of what it means to contribute
in various ways. We might want to bypass much of this since some of it
is addressed in other ways on the OpenOffice site. Then you can use the
drop-down to see an exhaustive list of the specific projects.
Personally, I don't find the listbox very intuitive. It is put at the
bottom of the page and requires quite some scrolling. And it doesn't
stand out either.
It is true that the OOo contributing page doesn't address code
contributions properly, but the listbox is not my first choice...
If it were
up to me to do something like this, I would also include a brief
explanation (I mean like less than 20 characters) of what the project
actually did, hopefully using some wording that most people/potential
developers could understand.
A listbox would however solve the problem of giving immediate access to
the projects without "cluttering" the frontpage (badly chosen word, I
know...) and could be done fairly easily (only have to find the right
spot for it...
ciao
Christian
--
===========================================================
Kay Schenk
"Money talks. Chocolate sings."
-- Unknown
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