Arje Cahn skrev:
...
The discussion about a new design for our website is great, but I feel there are
> much bigger mistakes that we have to get straightened out before the
shinyness of
> our website is of any importance. We need to decide where we put
what, as it's
> currently spread all over the place: Cocoon website, mailinglists,
the Wiki, blogs,
> zones.apache, Daisy documentation, etc etc...
Can agree that design isn't the highest priority. Neither the less it is
important and it is the first thing that meats the eyes of a newcomer.
The current design is something that we (thanks to the popularity of
Forrest) shares with hundreds of sites. So everybody have seen it
before. As we would like to think of Cocoon as something unique we
shouldn't look like everybody else. So if we have people in the
community who have the talent do do something about it, we should
wholeheartedly support such efforts.
So here's my list of things that TOTALLY SUCK about the Cocoon website :-)
- Someone has to maintain the Cocoon News page. There are now 4 entries on the
page,
> spanning a total 2 years of news. That totally sucks! For a newcomer,
this is not a
> good sign. It would really help, if we got someone to add 1 news
entry every month,
> with 3 lines minimum. We've recently added a bunch of committers to
the project, which
> is perfect to show that we're not DEAD. Let's put it on there!
Agree, we have plenty of activity in our community, so a couple of news
items per month would be a much better reflection of our reality. So how
do we achieve this?
First I think we need some common idea about what is a news item. Some
suggestions would be:
* New releases (with separate releases of the blocks there should be
plenty of things to report)
* Cocoon GT and ApacheCon and other conferences with Cocoon presentations
* Links to articles about or mentioning Cocoon and any other media coverage
* New products and (larger) sites using Cocoon
* New committers and ASF members with short presentations (Cocoon is a
strong and active community and that should be visible)
* New bloggs with Cocoon focus
* Important new features or developments
* Important discussions on the mail lists
More ideas?
Second we need some (simple) way to suggest news. I think we should
suggest possible news items at the dev-list by having a special headers
prefix like [news].
Third, as the website is our official voice, we need some kind of
community oversight. I think lazy consensus should be enough. If no one
have protested in maybe three days, we should add the news item to the
news page. Of course if someone with marketing skills would like
volunteer and take a larger responsibility for creating and editing the
news contents that would great.
- NEWS should be on the HOMEPAGE, not 2 clicks away from the homepage. I mean,
look
> at *any* commercial website and see how many clicks you need to get
to the news and
> marketing yadayada.
Agree completely. Let's imagine a first time visitor to our site. The
reason that she got to our site is probably that she has heard or read
about Cocoon and follow a link from another site or a search machine to
learn more. What will create most motivation for actually learning more
about Cocoon, an fairly abstract description about what Cocoon is or
lots of news items showing that this is the place where the action is ;)
And the returning visitor already know what Cocoon is, so for her it is
much more interesting to learn what is new and what happens.
It must of course be easy to find information about what Cocoon is, but
it shouldn't be the main content of the home page. On the homepage it
should be enough with one or two sentences about what it is. Take a look
at Spring e.g. own visual design and it starts with:
"Welcome to the home of the Spring Framework. As the leading full-stack
Java/J2EE application framework, Spring delivers significant benefits
for many projects, reducing development effort and costs while improving
test coverage and quality."
And then they continue with lots of news. That shows self confidence!
So why are we explain how it is:
"Welcome to the home of the Cocoon Framework. As the leading XML/Java
web application framework, Cocoon delivers significant benefits for many
projects, reducing development effort and costs while improving test
coverage and quality."
;)
...
- Documentation (sorry, Helma). So, it was Stefano's dream to once have a Cocoon
> CMS and run the Cocoon website with it. I don't think part of this
dream was to
> tuck it away on a hidden location so it will be forgotten forever.
How embarissing
> it is to see Helma working at the GT practically alone on all our
docs. This has
> everything to do with the total invisibility of the documentation
website. Let's
> bring it out into the spotlights. Let's give every committer a login,
or better yet,
> get Daisy to talk to the ASF's authentication server (free advice
Belgian guys).
Yes, lets add some "release early release often" to our documentation
effort. AFAIU we already have mechanisms for publishing from our Daisy
site to our home page. We should start to do that for the 2.2 docu right
away. In the beginning we of course need some disclaimers that both the
software and the documentation are early alpha. But seeing all the TBD
in the blocks framework documentation on our official site will create
more pressure on me to take my responsibility and actually write some
documentation ;)
/Daniel
