Re: RFD: Further Development of the Debian Website
Frank Lichtenheld <djpig@debian.org> wrote:
> Warning, lengthy mail ;)
Great, but you may want to have a very short summary at the top, to
encourage people to read and act on it sooner.
In general, I feel that the web site could be
improved. Personally, some common paths that I take are not the
obvious ones (such as Developer Corner -> homepage -> Mailing
List archives) because they are shorter than what seems obvious
(Developer Corner -> Support -> Mailing Lists -> Basic Use ->
List archives).
Any restructuring needs checking against a statistical analysis.
That may be hard to do in a usual web way. Can we get stats from
many mirrors? Anyone up for some qualitative testing?
> - Possible ideas:
> * Get feedback from users (-user* mailing lists?) to identify problems
> * Restructure and split up /devel/ to make it easier to find stuff
I'm not keen on splitting up /devel/ as an aim - that's sort
of our "common homepage for developers" and it's good to have
it all in my cache. I acknowledge that it needs a restructure,
but let's not prejudge the right way forward.
Is users and developers the best possible split of our
readership? I can think of other categories (distributors,
non-developer contributors) who are currently served by other
parts of the site (/CD/ and various others).
> News
> ----
> We have very different ways of getting and distribute news:
> - DWN (available from website) [RSS?]
> - debian-announce (available from website/frontpage)
> - debian-devel-announce (not available from website)
> - debian-security-announce (available from website/frontpage) [RSS]
> - news specific to sub projects (available from the websites of
> these projects)
> - archive changes (additions and removals) [RSS/RSS?]
> - blogs/Planet Debian [RSS]
The BTS and PTS should be added to this list explicitly.
It would also be good to consider how many people control
posts to each of these channels, who they are, etc.
> - Possible ideas:
> * develop a written policy for how and where certain classes of
> news should get distributed
I agree strongly. Linking advice this on /news/ or /devel/ would be good.
Maybe it should be part of "Beyond packaging" in developers-reference?
> Search
> ------
> search.debian.org is currently non-functional. Do we want to have
> a full text search again or should we leave this job to google?
It would be good to have special-purpose searches that exploit any
structure. For full-text searches, it would be good to have at least
two if we continue with external searching, for those moments when
google goes mad.
> Navigational Structure
> ----------------------
> Is the navigation bar we have at the top enough? Do we want more sidebar
> menus like we have on the frontpage and on the vote pages? This overlaps
> with the topic "Ways through the site".
There should be one navigation system. Those sidebars probably
should be killed off in favour of better index pages. If a few
links are so important that they should be on every page in a
section, a second row (distinct in colour) should be added to to
the navigation bar. If you can't jump to it easily (for example,
you have to scroll part way down the page) then it's really part
of the page content, not a quick navigation bar.
> (I have to admit I mainly navigate with my address bar through the
> website by just going directly where I want to go...)
That's probably a sign that this needs work urgently.
> Infrastructure
> --------------
> Is WML good or do we need something else like a CMS?
No.
> Should we perhaps migrate from CVS to SVN (or something else)?
Whatever is used, it should be easy for new users to grab
the source to a page or two and clear where patches should be
sent (debian-www?). This is important for a project which
doesn't have "releases" as such (as far as I know).
[I'm against SVN because it doesn't give enough of a clear
benefit over CVS to merit installing and learning it (unlike
the Arch-based solutions). I dislike SVN and its zealots enough
that I ignore and resent projects rather than use it. So far,
none of my "must-have" projects have moved to it.]
> Layout
> ------
> Do we need a new one? Or do we need slight modifications to the old one?
> How does one find a new layout? Developing a new layout also depends on
> other discussions like "Navigational Structure".
I think evolution rather than revolution.
[...]
> If you want to argue about several topics please do so in several mails.
> This will make it easier to contain discussions about certain topics to
> distinct threads.
I am not arguing. ;-)
The end of the email is the wrong place for this request. I
had read the email when it arrived, but I forgot this request
when I wrote my reply. It's now a pain to split. Bad usability!
> If we really get something going we should probably use the Debian
> wiki to summarise the discussion, record proposal and such. I will
> make a starting page at http://wiki.debian.net/?DebianWebsiteDiscussion
I find wiki.debian.net difficult to use (sets background with
no text colour, uses non-wiki markup language, registration
required). I'll leave that to you.
--
MJ Ray (slef), K. Lynn, England, email see http://mjr.towers.org.uk/
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