[bt-devel] General structure of the website

[Raoul Snyman]

On Thursday 18 February 2010 14:35:43 Eeli Kaikkonen wrote:
> My idea was to make "top level" sections which each can have
> subsections. The most important top level section is "BibleTime",
> "Application" or whatever we call it. It will be the Main and Home page
> of www.bibletime.info. The page would look something like this:

Thanks for the ideas, I like them, I just want to refine them slightly.

Firstly, while I agree with your idea of sections and pages within sections, 
the layout you have proposed has one section (BibleTime), two pages (Blog and 
Contact) and two external links (Develop and Facebook Page). In addition to 
that, I don't think we actually have enough content to have sections. 

> This "BibleTime" main section is meant to be for the application. It's
> strictly about the application, directed for the end users who want to
> know what BibleTime is, how to use it etc. It doesn't include anything
> "extra" like community or development stuff. Currently we don't have a
> good Features page. The Download page is already there.

Firstly, I think we *should* mix community and the application. Isn't that 
half of what Open Source is about, the community? That's why we've got the 
blog and the Facebook fan page. We're trying to build up a community around 
the core developers and contributors (i.e. those of us who hang around in IRC 
and comment on the bt-devel mailing list).

When you have a good community around your application, the developers can 
spend more time developing and less time supporting the application. As an 
example, look at Ubuntu. The reason it is so big is partly because of it's 
emphasis on community involvement.

I agree about not mixing the development stuff, however. I think that all the 
development stuff should probably go into the wiki, including translations.

>   *BibleTime*  Develop  Blog  Facebook page  Contact

This looks good, though "Blog" and "Contact" would just go to pages on the 
site, and "Develop", and "Facebook page" would be external links. I'd also 
swap "Blog" and "Develop" around. In addition to that, I'd probably have the 
"Download" page linked in that menu as well. "BibleTime" would become "Home".

> Then there is the Develop section. It could be only one page which gives
> the most important stable information and a link to the wiki. Another
> option would be to move the wiki to Drupal. Then the main wiki pages
> (which are now linked from the wiki main page) would be subsections:

No. The wiki must stay. As I mentioned earlier, I think all dev related stuff 
should go onto the wiki.

> The important thing now is to create a general page structure with main
> sections and subsections. Then it's easy to "move" pages (which means
> just linking them from different places, I think).

Agreed.

> page should be moved there. This all is of course temporary, but it's
> better to keep the blog page clean for end users while we work on the
> new website.

What end users? I think we have a total of about 10 users on the site, and I 
get the feeling that very few other people visit the blog.

These are, of course, my thoughts and opinion. It's also what I've experienced 
running the OpenLP site, and just being involved in open source in general.

-- 
Raoul Snyman, B.Tech IT (Software Engineering)
Saturn Laboratories
m: 082 550 3754
e: raoul.snyman at saturnlaboratories.co.za 
w: www.saturnlaboratories.co.za 
b: blog.saturnlaboratories.co.za