This discussion has branched out in a couple directions, but let me just
share a couple of my own thoughts.
1. I've been playing around with wordpress for my own selfish purposes:
http://www.flightgear.org/blogs/category/
I *really* like wordpress. It's slick, it's well done, it's well conceived,
it's easy to admin, it makes sense, add ons are easy to install and update.
It's a brilliant gem of a software package. But it's focused on blogs and
I'm not sure it would have the flexibilty or capabilities to do everything
we'd want to do. But we could do a lot with it and I could be talked into
trying this route.
2. I've played a bit with drupal, and in comparison to wordpress, it feels
much more adhoc and clunky, much less thought out, much more disorganized,
much less intuitive, much harder to admin, and much harder to make it do
what I want to do. My gut feeling when I was fiddling with it was that it
was weird, it didn't make good sense how it was laid out and organized.
Wordpress seems to be developed by a team that really "gets it". Drupal
seems to have evolved from a simpler system to a much more complex system
without someone keeping tabs on the high level vision that ties everything
together. That's my opinion. But drupal is *far* more flexible and
powerful so if we want to do things "our" way and really customize the site,
rather than go with a simpler wordpress way of doing things, drupal would be
an option, just a lot more clunky under the hood and a lot more effort to
get there.
3. The wiki is another interesting and viable option. I don't have a strong
opinion about setting it up and managing it because Simon has done all the
leg work on that, and now it is here and available.
4. I hear you folks who want to be able to program php/perl/python the
backend and really customize the site. I'm not sure what I think about
that. Certainly there are good reasons to be able to do some of this (the
aircraft download page was mentioned as one example.) We could have
this available, but maybe under a subdirectory so these pages would be
outside the scope of the main system if it didn't support this kind of
programming ... (?)
5. The aircraft download page is a big can o' worms! If we want to discuss
that page we should start a separate thread!!! This could probably end up
with it's own dedicated server if added all the features that everyone has
suggested. :-)
Regards,
Curt.
On Sun, Oct 10, 2010 at 3:42 PM, Hal V. Engel wrote:
> On Sunday, October 10, 2010 03:06:33 am Gijs de Rooy wrote:
> > + Download page: since the wiki already contains quite some information
> per
> > aircraft, it could be used to auto- generate a more detailed aircraft
> > download page. Each aircraft on that page can link to the aircraft's
> > "private" page (if existing)
>
> I guess that the private page is the one linked to from the page that
> contains
> the screen shots?
>
> If that is correct then this is a good idea. It will give the aircraft
> devs a
> place to add details for prospective down loaders.
>
> > and thus provide manuals, status info etc.
> > immediately to the user, even before downloading the aircraft.
>
> I have a PDF copy of the original pilots manual for the aircraft I am
> working
> on. But it is large (about 50 meg) and I have not included it as part of
> the
> model because of this. I think the private page is a good place to provide
> links for things like pilots manuals, test reports and other technical
> information. I like the idea of having a link from the download page to
> the
> aircraft private page.
>
> > As we've
> > had quite some complaints from people that are disappointed after
> > dowloading. The wiki can provde various screenshots per aircraft (eg.
> > interior, exterior), so users can see-what-they-get.
>
> There have been number of threads on the forum about this. The main issue
> seems to be that the current download page does not give down loaders much
> information on the actual development status of the aircraft. There are
> many
> aircraft that have nice looking 3D models but that have a poor/generic/no
> FDM
> and/or a cockpit that has few or no instruments. In addition, I did some
> checking and found that about 1/2 of all *-set.xml files in fgdata GIT do
> not
> have a <status></status> tag. For the most resent forum thread on this
> subject see
>
>
> http://www.flightgear.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=9680&sid=99395f48984aa9968144cd170c7ee011
>
> for a lengthly discussion of this (there was a little friction in this
> thread
> between two of the posters - please ignore this as most of the thread is on
> topic).
>
> If the web site is going to go through a major change then how the download
> stuff works should be carefully designed to try to reduce or eliminate
> these
> issues.
>
> I think the following would be useful:
>
> 1. Screen shots of the outside and interior are a good idea but are not a
> requirement IMO. But it looks like the private pages could handle this
> without too much difficulty.
>
> 2. In order to be on the download page the *set.xml file for any given
> aircraft
> should be required to have something valid in the <status></status> tag.
> This
> means that aircraft developers could prevent their models from appearing on
> the download page by simply not having a <status></status> tag.
>
> 3. There should be some standards/guide lines for what constitutes a valid
> status (I found one aircraft with a status of "true" and another with a
> status
> of "false" in fgdata GIT - clearly not valid) and also to help developers
> decide what status applies to their aircraft.
>
> 4. There should be information that indicates what version(s) of FG this
> aircraft will work with.
>
> 5. On the download page aircraft should be sorted based on development
> status
> with either separate sections or pages for each status. Those aircraft
> that
> have the most complete status should appear on the top of the download page
> or
> on the first page if multiple pages are used.
>
> Hal
>
>
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--
Curtis Olson:
http://www.atiak.com - http://aem.umn.edu/~uav/
http://www.flightgear.org -
http://www.flightgear.org/blogs/category/curt/<http://www.flightgear.org/blogs/category/personal/curt/>
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Beautiful is writing same markup. Internet Explorer 9 supports
standards for HTML5, CSS3, SVG 1.1, ECMAScript5, and DOM L2 & L3.
Spend less time writing and rewriting code and more time creating great
experiences on the web. Be a part of the beta today.
http://p.sf.net/sfu/beautyoftheweb
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