Howdy, Prompted by Chris Stevenson Bob and I have started playing around with the Maven generated site in order to make it easier to navigate and more useful. Currenlty the book I'm working with is Homepage Usability by Jakob Nielsen:
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/073571102X/qid=1071679585/sr=1-1/ref=sr_1_1/104-5601731-6202321?v=glance&s=books There are 113 recommendations so I'm slowly working through them to see what makes sense and what can be applied to the Maven generated site. As a simple start we've tried to make the site look better and not be so much a punch in the face when you first see it. Of course, this is purely subjective but we'll refine the design as we go. On the main Maven site now you'll notice that there is a "Quick Links" section. Currently I have this hardcoded into Maven's navigation.xml but it is something that I would like to generate for the standard site. I put a few entries there but suggestions for other hot items, like, Javadoc, FAQs are welcome. We'll take the most popular suggestions and add them to the "Quick Links" section or whatever it ends up being named. I've also started going through some of the reports and the first one I fixed was the dependencies report which Norbert pointed out as being too verbose. I agree so I changed the report back to its original terse format. I'll be going through the rest of the reports, comparing with some books I picked up but user feed back here is most important. I'm going to do a little more tweaking then I'm going to release the plugin. Hopefully people can try deploying their own sites and asking their users what they feel is important. I think in a couple weeks with some good feedback we can make some vast improvements to the standard generated site. I also have only looked at the site using Mozilla/Linux so there very well might be some problems with other platforms. Please just pop a note in JIRA if you see something that looks horrible. Take a peek at the work in progress: http://maven.apache.org/ -- jvz. Jason van Zyl [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://tambora.zenplex.org In short, man creates for himself a new religion of a rational and technical order to justify his work and to be justified in it. -- Jacques Ellul, The Technological Society --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
