For a longer time lots of people complained that the title page of the
three OpenPKG websites was too confusing (because the navigation bar had
to be left out because of space constraints, the three entry points were
not understood, etc), we've these days investigated and tried to fix the
issues.
The result is that all web pages now have a navigation _MENU_ at the
top which provides a _logical_ navigation (across all three websites).
The navigation bar (displayed on most pages in addition) still provides
the _physical_ navigation (based on splitting of pages between the
three website and organizations). Additionally, the title page provides
a fat highlighted horizontal banner which now contains "deep links",
partitioned according to the typical entry phases of our users.
Additionally, we've reduced the total amount of introduction text at the
top and spiced the title page both with latest activity summaries of the
CVS repository and security advisory areas and with some statistical
extracts from the OpenPKG Registry.
To further reduce the necessary space requirements (and to not present
too much information to the eye at once when accessing the page the
first time) the newsticker (right top), the activity summaries (bottom
left) and statistic reports (bottom right) now "fade" through multiple
content parts via some jQuery hacking ;-)
I don't know whether this revised title page it is now finally good
enough for the purpose it exists for, but at least it is now already
a lot better than before. But please do not hesitate to tell me more
problems you see, more wishes you have, etc.
PS: I've tried it with many current browsers forward and backward during
the development, including Firefox 2.0, MSIE 7.0, MSIE 6.0, Opera
9, Konqueror 3.5.5, etc. Mostly all worked just fine, except for
two things: MSIE 6, as always, is broken enough to still render the
bottom part incorrectly (despite lots of already existing MSIE 6
workarounds) and Konqueror has problems with the navigation menu.
On the MSIE 6 issues I finally give up, because this browser is
really such brain-dead that I loose one hour of my life-time every
minute I try to workaround all of its short-comings, non-standard
compliances, etc.
But I was not able to figure out why Konqueror is unable to render
the drop down menu correctly. If someone is able to figure out the
problem (and is able to help me fix it) he really gets an official
RSEwdiA (aka "RSE was deeply impressed award" ;-)
Ralf S. Engelschall
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
www.engelschall.com
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