From: John P. <joh...@su...> - 2004-12-17 19:49:31
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Jason McNair wrote: > Having already had a look at the site structure, I > can say from the start that it will require a complete overhaul This sounds ill considered - especially with your comment that Word files be part of the solution. > to get > the site into shape and full consistancy. What "shape" is it that you have in mind? What "consistency" do you see missing from what is there? As the last one to work on the web page structure itself, my goals were to extract as much of the original site into stylesheets as I could, simplify and expose the site navigation, unify duplicated content, and make room for others to add content where they wished. Some of those "un-fleshed-out areas" are FAQs, application user docs, tutorials, community pages (wiki's/blogs/...) and the like; all of us would love to see interested and motivated parties become active in providing content for these areas. > I will be creating a parrallel site that won't be accessible for the users On the other hand, if your desire is simply to throw it all away and start over because of some control or NIH issues, I'd suggest that a less aggressive starting point might be worthwhile - it certainly would avoid alienating those of us who worked on this in the past. > The Website re-vamp is going to take time, as there is a lot to be done. Instead of working in a vacuum with unknown goals, why not discuss the shortcomings you see and the things that you want to do to address them? Web site look and feel changes are as simple as changing a style sheet. Creating content is as simple as getting it written. New features (blogs, databases...) just require someone to do the work. Seeing examples is a good way to make progress here. > look at the documentation especially The whole web site is documentation - is there some particular part that offends you specifically? Specifics are good here - is the whole site a mess, or is it one smaller compartment? Have I overlooked some critical requirement that makes the whole site unusable, or is there simply a set of pages that were poorly transformed or integrated? > you will find that there are quite a lot of > broken links and files in there. How about starting simple - run the "documentation" thru a validator/spider and make a list of which files have broken links. Then we all can work on fixing them. > I like my code clean, neat and fast So do I, but that has little or nothing to do with the JMRI *web site*. The whole idea of style sheets is to keep the "code" in the individual html pages to a minimum; once that is done, all we are left with is content. And, it is content - namely, the creation of - that is missing from the JMRI web presence. We are getting better, people are writing and contributing manuals and tutorials, but IMHO we need content more than we need more web code. If I were to spend time "coding" the web site, I'd probably spend it replacing the perl script hack that updates the html headers and footers with a simple server-side-include or XSLT transform; next on my list would be to eliminate 50-75% of the stylesheet tags in default.css because they are either not used, or are used incorrectly - simple is good. But these are nits - not show-stopper emergencies that require a complete rewrite. I'm looking forward to your insights and energy helping us all to improve the JMRI website. -John |