Website redesign (was Re: Please clear up DarwinPort/MacPorts confusion)

[Juan Manuel Palacios]

On Apr 6, 2007, at 2:45 PM, Sean Fulton wrote:

>>
>
> That's all fine and good but I want jump in the pile-on and say that 
> the site and documentation need some serious attention. Having 
> outdated docs in SVN is less than ideal.
>
> Now that 1.4 is out will there be some effort to providing useful 
> documentation? Do the project leads need volunteers to help? I'm 
> willing.
>


	At first I thought about saying "Ooohh, we so *totally* need 
volunteers to clean-up/improve our site!!", but then I asked myself 
"improve *how* and *what* exactly?"

	I think it's pretty clear to everyone that we need a major website and 
documentation overhaul (that said with my MacPorts Manager hat on!), so 
I'd say that before we do any minor and possibly random rearrangements 
and/or cleanups here and there, one thing we need to do, as a team and 
as openly as possible, is to discuss what we would like to see in a new 
website (including everything: welcoming portal, downloads section, 
documentation section, headlines, trac integration, per ports page, 
etc...).

	I've been thinking about bootstrapping this discussion and putting 
forth some initial ideas into the mix, and maybe even asking (inviting) 
some of the WebKit folks to give us a hand with the redesign (they 
obviously have a thing for websites ;-); but other than that, we as a 
team don't have much of a roadmap with respect to our site, admittedly 
and unfortunately. I'll bring the subject up with the other managers 
and MacOSForge admin personnel to at least get an initial feeling of 
what we can do (not only resource wise but also with respect to some 
guidelines we have to stick by), and will post again on the subject 
when I get a clearer idea. I think it's wise to ask everyone with 
either a dire stray need for a new site (because the current one 
sucks!) and/or the appreciated willingness to help, to wait until such 
time for us to better coordinate all our efforts toward defined and 
*specific* goals (other than the vague "we need a new site!"). Thanks 
to all for your patience!

	In the mean time, two documents I would like to work on (and could 
frankly use some help with like *now*), are:

http://trac.macosforge.org/projects/macports/wiki/InstallingMacPorts
http://trac.macosforge.org/projects/macports/wiki/TracTicketing

	The first one was edited not long ago, but I haven't had a chance to 
go over it. In any case, the installation page we had back on the 
OpenDarwin site was pretty good and I think we could re-use some of the 
material that was there (in svn, trunk/www/getdp). The second one deals 
with the guidelines for filing trac tickets, and needs revising in view 
of our new roadmap and milestones; I promised I'd deliver that document 
a couple of weeks ago but I've been so up to my neck that I only 
managed to complete the 1.4.0 release just some days ago!

	If you, Sean, or anyone else reading is willing to help me with these 
two docs, at least, don't hesitate to contact me to coordinate work. 
Thanks in advance for your offer!

	Regards to all and thanks again for your patience and for coping until 
now with out *cough* excuse *cough* for a website!


-jmpp