[jsword-devel] CrossWire website up and running

[Peter von Kaehne]

Dear All,

After a last late night session with Troy to hammer out wording and some
design flaws the new website for CrossWire is up and running.

I have incorporated a lot of the ideas etc which were mentioned on the list.

I am sure (actually I am aware of some) there are enough problems left
with the site as it stands, but I decided it is now so much better than
what had been there (and all the flaws present now were already present)
that an update could happen.

I have done no radical redesign of look and feel - rather the opposite.
I am no designer and my taste is appalling and saw no need to inflict it
onto the world.

I have though radically gutted the structure of the previous site,
removed table designs as far as I could, removed inline style statements
largely and particularly removed style like HTML markup. All this is now
controlled by a single CSS sheet. everything possible is encapsulated in
a div and all divs should have an id or a class, possible both. So if
anyone feels called to create a new look - it should be easy.

The site should work fine in a text browser. No Javascript is used.

My target was to make the site a) maintainable to a simple user like
myself and b) bring it into a shape where it can again collect dust, but
without causing too much damage that way.

So all stuff which is and should be dynamic and changing is concentrated
in a few places and made easily maintanable

Specific problems remaining:

The biggest is now the Sword site - it is gutted and largely without
coherence. I will work on that.

The next are several subsites /osis, /crosswire and /flashcards
(probably a few more) which break the design. This is easily remedied
and will happen in the next few days.

The software list are still quite long (but much shorter) and the
screenshots are still there. There are different opinions here regarding
the suitability of screenshots (i.e Troy thinks they should stay, others
think they should go) and I simply did not care enough to fight it out.
Once someone comes up with a cool idea on which all agree I will change
it. But just for the record - not everyone's icon is nice enough or
informative enough, so icons instead of screenshots are right now a
valid alternative (and then, some projects do not have icons)

The Sword fora need to be restyled as CrossWire fora if at all possible.
I had no look yet at them, but will do so.

A central code page should be there. I will look into that. Once up and
running it shall contain links to all public repos and all latest
tarballs etc of all directly hosted CW projects.

I like my icon bar for looking at software categories, but am not
conviced yet by its handling. If someone has an idea how to make it less
jumpy I would be grateful.

If you are aware of anything else, please tell. Now is the time.

And if you really hate what I have done... all is in svn.

Yours in Him

Peter