Starting re-factoring from en is a good idea. And automating translation
of the various pages is even greater, but I think we should prepare and
restructure content for this first (I don't mean only technical
restructuring).
I think the home page could be greatly simplified to contain much less
text while being even more useful (would be more focused). That would
also make it very quick&easy to translate and to maintain. Also
openoffice.apache.org seems largely like a duplicate of
www.openoffice.org. De-duplication of information and deciding what goes
where would be great (also great for translation). Did you know for
example that after de-duplication the gov.uk website it went from 70k to
only 3k pages! Imagine how much easier it is to maintain it. Would be
nice if you could get Sara Wachter-Boettcher to help. I've seen her
presentation on Mobilism about structuring data of companies and she
seem to have already done things like OpenOffice website(s) needs. Not
sure if she works pro bono though and (if she doesn't) I don't know if
AOO has a budget for things like that.
Anyway here's my taking on restructuring data/content.
* Home page
o Download link (much like it is already done on the download page).
o Composition of screenshots of the latest version (not
necessarily in native language, but would be cool if automated).
Something like a hand of cards showing the Writer and the Calc
on the sides and maybe the welcome page in the middle but in the
bottom layer. Or maybe whole suite showing example documents?
o On the right there should only be links that are now on the left
(I want/need links).
o Below all that I would make 3 boxes (side-by-side) with the
boxes from the download page (Help Spread the Word, Extensions
and Dictionaries and Templates).
* Overview page
o The link "I want to learn more about OpenOffice" should point here.
o Content of the main page of "why" seems to be duplicate of the
main page of "product". I actually like "product" page more.
o Add link to "why" in "More" submenu of the overview page.
o So maybe just keep the product page and call it overview.
* News page
o The link "I want to stay in touch with OpenOffice" should point
here.
o News on the left (would be cool if news could be posted in many
languages and a single language would get en-news and native news).
o Blog posts on the right (similar sidebar that is on the right on
the main page).
* Get involved page
o The link "I want to participate in OpenOffice" should point here.
o Should be a short page.
o I think I translated this so this is actually already in the
Pottle - would be great to just use that (maybe with a bit of
transformation e.g. parsing text URLs into HTML tags).
o Add information about Pottle itself (or was it there already - I
don't remember).
* Menu
o Overview (as described)
o Download (as-is) - would be partially a duplicate of new home,
but I believe it's OK here as it is generated anyway.
o Support (as-is)
o News (as described)
o Get involved (as described)
o Remove other - here's why:
+ Blog - external site; just keep links on the news page
+ Extend - duplicate of things on the download page
+ Develop - already on the main page and would be on get
involved page; also it is a de facto external website
+ Focus Areas - remove doesn't seem very interesting for a
regular user - maybe you could move it to openoffice.apache.org.
+ Native Language - this doesn't seem to be very useful -
would be useful only if integrated with Pottle (giving
information on current progress of translation).
Other stuff
* Language switch - should be automatic and optionally there could be
a switch above the menu on the right.
* Search should be bigger (at least a bit wider).
* Links to an external site should indicate they are external.
Wikipedia has a quite nice way of doing that and it only requires a
single CSS rule for all browsers that count.
Translation
* I think would could use Pottle for basic strings with an addition of
some transforming scripts.
o "po" files could e.g. be translated to JSON style objects for
JavaScript (if needed).
o to make the site static we could pre-render HTML directly from
po files treating HTML files as templates (e.g. replace
"{{Product}}" with it's translation)
o "templates" would still be standard HTML files and so CMS/SVN
could still be used to edit what would now be templates
(whatever CMS you are using - it would just edit different
things that are shown)
* Pushing changes
o you could then add a job to CMS to render page (or pages) - this
would just run prepared scripts
o ...or use Jenkins for automatically rendering pages after
changes in CMS (it could e.g. listen on changes in a certain
directory of the SVN)
o Jenkins could also be used to download and transform po files
from Pottle (don't know if you are using any automation already)
* Pottle packages (and levels of translation)
o "Basic" - home page and all links in menu (i.e. everything
visible on the new home/index page).
o "Main pages" - translation of all main pages i.e.
+ product/index.html, but not product/writer.html
+ support/index.html - probably divided into sections (i.e.
title of OpenOffice Documentation and it's content separately)
+ download/index.html (most would be in Basic package; so
probably only links on the right would need translations -
might just be a blob of HTML which would make it easy to add
or remove links for some languages)
o Subpages - if not translated then the submenu should not be shown
+ "Product subpages"
+ "Why subpages"
+ "Support subpages"
...
OK. This mail is much longer then I planned ;-). I hope someone reads it.
Regards,
Nux.
