Thanks for the thinking and work that went into this proposal, Ted and Mimi!
Some wide-ranging comments are included below. Overall, please proceed! Ted Leung wrote: > I think we've reached the point of having a good proposal for changes to > the various web sites... Could you enumerate the list of sites intended to be changed? > A big part of our effort has been to get a good taxonomy for the content > in the portal. The taxonomy seems to sort the information space in a pleasant, non-overlapping way. I was going to complain that Product and Planning in the header would get confused, but I see how the Product pages has cross-links which seem helpful for guiding people gone astray, so looks good there. > The general workflow that we have observed is > that content is making its way into the wiki via the notes pages of > individuals. As the content on those pages becomes more concrete, it > migrates to pages related to a project or to pages related to a > particular group. To what extent have you observed this happening vs official content staying in the Journal areas? > Some information from those project or group pages > needs to be collected and presented to specific audiences for the portal > (project contributors versus people new to Chandler versus the press, > and so on). The proposed design provides superior presentations of the content to those specific audiences, as intended. Excellent job. > By reorganizing the portal content around this workflow, > we hope to make it easier for portal consumers to differentiate between > official OSAF thinking and ideas which are still in rough form. Do consumers distinguish "official" vs "ideas" by how they navigated to a resource or by looking at the page itself once there? Is everything unofficial in the Notes area like it is in Journal today? I'm not clear how this specific idea is changing. > To > make this more explicit we plan to have a number of areas in the portal, > corresponding to product and/or group pages. You can see the areas and > their taxonomies at > <http://wiki.osafoundation.org/bin/view/Journal/WikiReTaxonomy>. The areas specifically are: (Appear to be top-level from the designs) * ProductWikiArea * EngineeringWikiArea * PlanningWikiArea * TeamsWikiArea * NotesWikiArea (And other?) * CommunityNotesWikiArea * CommunityWikiArea * EndUserWikiArea * GetInvolvedWikiArea * PressWikiArea Correct? How does one navigate to the Press area? The End User Area looks interesting; might that be dominated by things like chandler.osafoundation.org? I would probably vote to simplify the left-hand nav by removing the Vision/Roadmap/Planning, in favor of a strong (possibly renamed) "What's the system?" or perhaps shrinking to one item added to the top block. > You can also see the home pages that Mimi has mocked up for the various > areas. The goal of these pages is to be jumping off points into the > content of a particular area and to display current information about > the status of an area. The visual layout of these pages is designed to > help portal consumers gain a high-level understanding of the structure > of the project, and it's organization. They seem to acheive that goal to me. > The status portion (right > column) of the pages is now sectioned into NEW, NOW, DEFERRED, and > ARCHIVE as a way of helping people to quickly understand the state of a > project or team. A portal user will be able to see what tasks/projects > are currently in focus, what information has gone out of date, and > things that have been deferred until later We plan to use some wiki > automation to generate the status portions of these home pages. I have some concerns about the right hand nav making pages difficult to view on smaller screens. It'll probably work well enough on index pages designed primarily as jump-off points, but perhaps interfere with the reading of some long-winded documents. From the page comps for the people detail pages, the right-hand nav is present on that lower-level page. Is the intent then for the right-hand nav to be present on all pages throughout the wiki? That should be technically possible. I'd like to see how it works out, but I'm not yet sure I'll like the results when done globally. If we can keep an open mind about how that works out, that'd be nice. It's also known that I have some concerns about the performance impact of running lots of dynamic searches to form sections of the page (like the right-hand nav); I will try to be creative and diligent about trying to make the New/Now/Deferred thing work magically on the backend (query caching or something). If that fails, or time isn't available or the "source data" (tagging, forms, keywords, whatever) is bad, the right-hand nav functionality has some risk to keep an eye one. It appears that the Engineering and Planning areas share a right-hand nav. Other areas have more specialized unique right-hand navs? Is the right-hand nav actually blocks, some of which are reused in different combinations? Both the right nav and the cross-link features, which are nice, appear to rely heavily on editorship, pruning, regular updates, etc. What are the assumed workflows and supporting mechanisms envisioned to be necessary to support this information design? Will people just be able to change the status on the leaf page and everything falls in to place. I see the 6 axes section near the top, which look pretty reasonable. Are there other specific areas of the new site that need maintenance to work properly? > In addition to the area home pages, we will have specialized home pages, > like the wiki main page and the project landing/home pages, which will > assemble information that is aimed at particular audiences. Is this where the Press link comes in? Are there any known areas where cross-links are needed between the different types of sites? Anything off an Area home page? This section of the page: ----- Things are roughly organized into 3 product areas: * Ecosystem * Scooby Web Calendar Plugin * Cosmo CalDAV server ----- Is this part of the site design? Why Scooby "Plugin"? There's probably a desktop client in there somewhere, per the Planning overview page. I'd like to see more consistent capitalization of non-first words in the leftnav. "Mail lists" not "Mail Lists", continuing the "Get involved" style that's already on there. I like what I see and look forward to helping with implementation. Nothing above seems to be any blocker on closing the last call. Thanks for reviewing. +1. -- Jared _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ Open Source Applications Foundation "General" mailing list http://lists.osafoundation.org/mailman/listinfo/general
