At 10:01 AM -0500 4/7/14, Ryan Schmidt wrote:
Dear fellow MacPorts developers and enthusiasts,
I've been working on a new MacPorts web site for some time, and I
would like to share with you my work so far:
url: http://macports.ryandesign.com:8080
username: mp
password: 333
It is not yet complete but I hope it gives an idea of the direction
I'm going, and I very much hope that you like it.
In some areas I tried multiple different page designs; on those
pages you'll see a widget for selecting among them.
Gentle feedback about what works and what doesn't (both functionally
and conceptually) and what else you think should be there would be
helpful; with any luck I'll agree with you. But let's distinguish
between features which are essential to get to a functional first
version that we can publish, and those features that would be nice
to have eventually but which can be postponed until later so as not
to delay the initial release.
My focus so far has been on the following areas:
* Make the homepage simple and inviting
Very nice!
Possible tweaks: The first section of the page takes up half a
screen on my Mac. I think it could be a little more compact. I
agree that the Lean More and Contribute sections should move to their
own pages. Personally, I think the recent port updates section
should be more prominent. Shows that the project is active and gives
a flavour for the software that MacPorts actually provides.
* Make the install page as simple as possible, providing
instructions specific to each OS X version
Well done, enormous improvement.
* Provide a page for each port, containing helpful information
extracted from the Portfile, logically and attractively presented
* News
* Site infrastructure
* Database
Further work to be done, in no particular order and not necessarily
before the first release:
* Further database and import script overhauls (maybe later)
* Port search, at least equivalent to what ports.php on the current
web site can do (essential)
Agreed.
* Port pages:
* Variants (essential)
* Licenses (essential)
* Subports (essential)
* Distributability and binary package availability (nice to have;
pretty easy)
* Version and revision history (nice to have; difficult)
Agreed.
* Maintainer info pages (later)
* Category info pages (later)
15 ports per page is too little. Perhaps make it user-selectable?
I'd think 25 is the absolute minimum.
However, no one is going to browse the 3,500+ ports in devel. In the
badge view it says 2,072. Does that mean 2,072 where the first
category is devel; 3,520, have devel somewhere in the list of
categories?
I think we should have sub-category pages for the high-volume
categories. For example, libhttpd has categories {devel www}. So
the devel page could lead to a devel/www sub-category with a much
narrowed list. Same for perl, python, php,
As ports are updated, we can try to add/modify categories. There are
20+ categories with 10 or fewer ports according to the badge view.
All of these should be pruned. I'm sure others could be combined, as
well.
I think each category page could also show the most-requested ports,
perhaps the top 25.
* Learn how the new statistics-gathering code in base works and
integrate with it
To me, the number of reported installs (split between requested and
installed as a dependency) is interesting. Perhaps comparing last
week, last month and last year. I think there should be a separate
page with more detailed statistics for each port (by OS, by version,
etc).
Thanks for all your efforts; it is a huge improvement.
Craig
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