On Jun 7, 2006, at 1:01 PM, Jared Rhine wrote:
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?
www.osafoundation.org
wiki.osafoundation.org
chandler.osafoundation.org
cosmo.osafoundation.org
scooby.osafoundation.org
It's harder to say how the last 3 sites will change because they will
be impacted by the branding exercise that will be starting up shortly.
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 contributors are diligent about migrating content, others are
not. Our goal is to encourage this workflow, both structurally, and
perhaps via some automation.
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.
Officialness has to do with which area you are looking at.
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?
Correct.
Nav the the press area will be at least from www.osafoundation.org,
perhaps other of the landing pages
The End user area might be dominated by <product>.osafoundation.org,
or might merge with those sites. This is a litte open, but not bad.
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.
We can deal with that when we get to the lens pages.
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.
The right nav will not be present in the content pages, only the top
level pages.
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.
Agreed, and we will have to work on that.
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?
I think that's TBD.
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?
The ideal is to have status changed / tags applied and have
everything fall into place. The fallback from there is to have
humans do the work
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 is where the Press link will come it. Other crosslinking
areas are landing pages to end user area.
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.
The terminology will be rationalized.
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.
We can deal with this once we get started building/implementing.
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.
Thanks for the thorough read!
Ted
_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _
Open Source Applications Foundation "General" mailing list
http://lists.osafoundation.org/mailman/listinfo/general
