[Welcome to session #7829 of the open source UN] While I agree with Dion that the look and feel is secondary to content, unification of labels is the most important thing. Users should expect a project site to contain a certain set of content types, and a certain name for each content type.
Actually, I'm utterly agreeing with Dion, it just seemed like a bad habit to get into this early in the game, so I had to begin by disagreeing. However, a consistent skin might actually be the best way to get a consistently labelled and functional site together. Now I get to disagree with Dion :) His list of important things, the ones Maven produce, are by and large not important. The important things are the ones the user cares about: 1) Where do I download? 2) Has their been a release? 3) Where are the tutorials/documentation? 4) How do I complain about a bug? 5) Where do I ask a question? and then more minor questions like: 6) So who is behind Project X? 7) What Apache community does Project X belong to? Currently, very few of these are well represented across the site. Generally this is a fault of the new looks and feels, the old ones managed to at least maintain consistent labelling and functionality. Examples: Alexandria uses the old look and feel, but fails to maintain the same navigation. Ant. Confusion to user? Should this be listed as a project on Jakarta, or should this be an alumni? This is a fault of the front page. Generally Ant has good links of the nav-bar, are they consistent with anyone else? They are quite close to the front page. Avalon. Look and feel is a mix between the old and the new. Quite nice. However it fails to match the navigation structure of Ant and the old site. BCEL. Mavenised? There is no download opption on the front page. This is the biggest problem on sites of this look and feel, user's cannot download the product. BSF. Old style. Nav-bar relatively the same as the front page. .... and the others are no better .... Then the front-page. Dominated by news making it hard to see the welcome. Those who can't do, complain. But I'm happy to be a member of both sets. I believe the first step is to actually try to cross-manage the site. Tbh, I think we could go a lot further wrong than by listing out an information architecture for the site [I borrowed this from the OReilly Info-Arch book: http://www.generationjava.com/articles/web/infoArch.shtml]. Once a site-wide contract for labelling and minimum functionality is ironed out, each particular look and feel, project and generational tool are free to enhance it as much as they want, as long as they: eg) Provide a link called 'Download nightly build' or whatever. Hen On Fri, 31 Jan 2003 [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > Content of the site is far more important to me than the skin. > > I'd much rather we had all projects/sites listing a common, agreed upon > set of information that is useful. For example, the set of reports maven > produces under the heading Project Info (see > http://jakarta.apache.org/turbine/maven/project-info.html ), along with > source cross reference and javadocs, cvs activity reporting, unit test and > 'style conformance'. > > Skins are secondary for me. If we could get consistent content across > Jakarta, having a consistent look and feel would be the next step. But > having everything look pretty but be incomplete is not much of a step up. > > So, how about getting some consistency in our navigation and content as > part of the process? > -- > dIon Gillard, Multitask Consulting > Blog: http://www.freeroller.net/page/dion/Weblog > Work: http://www.multitask.com.au > > > Glen Stampoultzis <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote on 31/01/2003 12:44:53 > PM: > > > Hi. I think this is important and I would love to see some unification > of > > skins on Apache. While we may choose to use different tools to build > our > > sites but I think we should push to make the look of the project > > consistent. The current mess of different skins makes the site look > sloppy. > > > > Agree/disagree? Lets hear your opinion. > > > > Regards, > > > > Glen Stampoultzis > > > > > > At 08:42 AM 30/01/2003 +0100, you wrote: > > >Hi all! > > > > > >I saw the "Tapestry" discussion, and this remindet me, that I wanted to > > >"carry" FakeForrest to Jakarta! > > > > > >So what is it? Simple: It's a set of 2 Velocity/Anakia template-files > and > > >some images. The Velocity templates are build upon the Jakarta-ones and > > >follow the Jakarta-Anakia-DTD! > > > > > >What does it? It renders Anakia-build websites with the (current - with > some > > >small modifications - see below) Forrest skin. > > > > > >Where can I find it? We currently use this to build the > > >http://ant.apache.org website so you can preview the result there and > the > > >sources are in the Ant-cvs > > >http://cvs.apache.org/viewcvs/jakarta-ant/xdocs/stylesheets/. > > > > > >Why should we use it? IMHO it is the FASTEST way to provide a nice, > > >functional and consistent look of the entire xxx.apache.org website! > > > > > >Are there any limitations? Yes: Currently there are no multiple tabs > for > > >menues on the left side, but this can easyly be solved by allowing > multiple > > >menu-sections in the proect.xml > > > > > >Additionally: We (Conor ;)) recently fixed some incompatibilities with > the > > >HTML 4.01 standard so it now generates validatable HTML 4.01 code! It's > > >proved, it works, it's nice ;). > > > > > >Remark: I do not see Fake-Forrest as the final solution, but its a nice > and > > >fast way in moving to a nice new, consisten etc. look of the Apache > website, > > >as I said before! > > > > > >Thoughts? > > >Christoph > > > > > >--------------------------------------------------------------------- > > >To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] > > >For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] > > > > > > > > --------------------------------------------------------------------- > > To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] > > For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] > > > > > ForwardSourceID:NT000AB40A > > --------------------------------------------------------------------- > To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] > For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] > > --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
