Re: GNUstep Site Redesign

First of all, hello! I'm not sure how I got roped into this, but I  
did a new site design, and am working on converting it to HTML (and  
PHP) right now. The response overall was quite positive, so we're  
moving forward with it (as far as I can tell -- I got no one telling  
me 'no').

> "Stefan Bidigaray" <address@hidden> wrote:
> > Just FYI, I think it would make more sense if this discussed the  
> redesign in
> > this ML.
> >
> > Here's a summary of what's been discussed so far:
>
> Yeah, it would be nice if the poor sods who get to maintain it get
> some chance to comment... ;-) Where was the past discussion?

It happened on discuss-gnustep, most recently under the subject Site  
Redesign. Also, it was never my intention to throw work on anyone,  
hence my own conversion of the site to HTML/CSS/PHP. I'm also willing  
to do much of the maintenance of it, if need be.

> Some of
> the menu ordering decisions look a bit odd ("Donations" under
> "Support"?), so I'd be interested to see the reasons.

I wanted to limit the number of top level items -- Support is perhaps  
the wrong word... maybe Contribute? Or maybe we need to split those  
up to two items: Support (for Bugs and Contact info), and Contribute  
(for Donations and How to get involved). Donations shouldn't be a top- 
level item though -- it should fall under a general "giving back"  
category, like Contribute.

> > This is the current mock up by Jesse (feel free to comment on it):
> >  http://jesseross.com/clients/gnustep/site/02.png
>
> Looks good as a graphic and it looks like it should convert to
> xhtml/css fairly well.

Yep -- the translation is going smoothly so far.

> Question: "Recent Commits" only shows one
> commit, so isn't it mistitled?

Not if we allow for some sort of Javascript cycling of commit  
messages, say the last 5 or so. Also, by making it plural and linking  
to the Status page (or a subsection of the News page, as Stefan  
suggested), we show that there has been a lot of activity recently  
(which was one of our prime motives for the site redesign).

> Also, will most front page users know
> what a "commit" is anyway?  Are we keeping one front page for all, or
> having a front news page, a user-home and a devel-home?

GNUstep is, at its core, a developer tool and environment. And we  
need to appeal to developers in order to get more apps built, in  
order to get more users and mind- and market-share. Developers will  
likely know what commits are, and if they don't, they can click and  
see "Oh, they're adding a lot of new stuff... daily!", which is the  
impression that we want to give. We want people to know that GNUstep  
is an active, alive project.

The front page news will be pulling from the News section, which will  
be just a Planet installation (assuming we can get Python installed,  
or find a PHP version). Planet is a feed aggregator ( http:// 
www.planetplanet.org/ ), and we want to pull all the disparate  
GNUstep-related blogs under a single site, in order to show users  
that we are alive, and we have developers working on things. The  
front page news will just show the last 5 entries on the News page,  
which will be the last 5 things posted to the blogs we pull from --  
and we just need to determine which blogs those are. Chances are some  
of the content will be very technical, some will be about new app  
releases, and some will be examples of work in progress stuff -- no  
separation of "developers" or "users".

> I'm a little puzzled why "Get Started" is repeated and I wonder
> where/how the body text is coming from, but I expect those have been
> discussed already too.

The Header version of Get Started is swappable -- we could put  
anything that we want to focus on there. Or, if we want it to always  
to get a Get Started page, we could use different terminology. I'm  
still working through that.

> [...]
> > Adam pointed out that we will need to contact Manuel Guesdon (
> > address@hidden) as well as address@hidden (their website is in
> > French, do we need a French speaking person to make contact) for  
> information
> > on the available software.  We can probably do this while we're  
> deciding
> > what is needed, and also by someone that understands about web site
> > design/programming.
>
> No, I don't think so - they speak pretty good English.  S'il y a
> besoin, je traduiserai.  IIRC, the current site supports PHP, but
> anything else (databases or whatever) will need a request.

I sent an email off to him yesterday... we'll see what we hear back.  
At there very least, yes, we need PHP. And Python perhaps, for the  
Planet installation. We shouldn't need a db though, unless Planet  
requires it.


J.

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