[bt-devel] General structure of the website

[Eeli Kaikkonen]

On Thu, 18 Feb 2010, Raoul Snyman wrote:
> 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.

The sections could be BibleTime, Develop, Community, Contact as well.
My main point is that we shouldn't put all navigation links in the left
side navigation box like in the old site. The sections would divide the
site contents into manageable chunks which each would have some
subsections, which in turn would be represented as left side navigation
box. There would probably also be pages which don't have direct
navigation box links but which are linked directly from other pages. In
the breadcrumb style:

BibleTime  Develop  Community

Home			BibleTime>Features>Window layout
Download
Features
Screenshots
...

(I really would like to have that breadcrumb navigation, too.)

> 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.

We are talking about a different thing. I'm not suggesting keeping
application, community and developers separated. I'm trying to find an
easy to use site structure. It's just a question of putting some page
links to proper places. For example, we don't want to have this kind of
left side navigation box:

Home
Download
Mailing lists
Development
Facebook page

This is what I mean by "mixing" things. There will be too many links if
we put together links that semantically don't belong together (like in
the old site). Instead, we put all community related stuff to one main
section and all application related to another.

>
> 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".
>

My suggestion was actually more like a discussion starter than a
complete structure - it's only good if you find a better one. Actually
my main concern was to enable this kind of structure in the first place
so that we could create pages and then link them from anywhere. It
should be easy to move a link from the top nav bar to the left nav box
or just to some page, as long as the nav box and nav bar are there.


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

Is it possible to integrate the wiki to drupal? Like moving all the
pages to another wiki engine which drupal supports, using the same skin
than the main page etc.  It would be a "nice to have" feature.

Whether or not this is possible, we could have the Develop main section
link and one or more static pages. Even one page would be enough, it
would include the most important non-changing information and link to
the wiki.

> > 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.

That I didn't know :) I guess it's OK then.


  Yours,
	Eeli Kaikkonen (Mr.), Oulu, Finland
	e-mail: eekaikko at mailx.studentx.oulux.fix (with no x)