[sword-devel] [New Website] application page, OS icon bar, news

[Eeli Kaikkonen]

Peter von Kaehne wrote:
> My whole aim is to make this website so that we can again largely forget
> about it.
>
>   
You have already succeeded very well.


> News - I would like to have more feedback on that. Currently the news
> stream is pretty dull and not at all up to date. Chris (and Troy?)
> thinks it should be in SWORD only, but there is some discrepancy what
> SWORD actually means to all of us - Troy will put some questions to
> project leads himself.
>
>   
What would the users want to see? Who they are, why they read our news? 
Do they want to see new Sword engine releases which are not useful to 
them because they are not programmers? Or are they developers who want 
to see news about the engine, technology etc.? Are they interested about 
several frontends, building and testing them after interesting svn 
commits? Or do they want to see when their favorite app is updated?

It's very hard to say what should be there. It's even harder because 
there's no single person who finds out all the interesting things and 
puts the content in, unless it's restricted to the engine. If there are 
several people who put content in, there's no consensus about what's 
worthy of publishing and what's not. Each project would like to have a 
bit more visibility, or there's too much work with other things that the 
developers could update the information.

One solution could be two news streams, one for end users (about 
frontends and stable modules) and one for developers (engine news, OSIS 
news, other techology news, important svn commits, beta modules...)

> Personally though I think we can have news pages on most sub sites, if
> only we have enough news to go around.The news admin page allows to
> enter news in different categories, which in turn would in theory
> enables us to put out different aspects/categories out in different
> places. So feedback on that idea, please!
>
>   
There's no use to create news streams which aren't updated regularly. 
The project looks dead if the last piece of news is half a year old. We 
need more content.

> Also some concerted effort by project leads to enter news for their
> frontend into the admin page:
>
>
> Isn't BT already at 1.7?
>   
If you count the beta versions. The description text will need update 
sooner or later. We can't advertise our cross-platformity quite yet but 
I don't like giving the users an idea of a KDE-only app, either. Maybe this:


"BibleTime [notice: "for Qt/KDE" is not good here anymore]

BibleTime is a Bible study tool with excellent support for different 
types of texts and languages. Even large amounts of works (Sword 
modules) are easy to install and manage. Text display windows can be 
laid out freely. The older 1.6 series needs the KDE 3 desktop 
environment but KDE 4 based 1.7 is in beta phase and support for systems 
without KDE, including Windows and MacOSX, is underway."


I removed the empty statement about "powerful" app. Everyone wants to be 
powerful and user friendly, but those words don't say anything unless 
you can prove them with some objective method. "Excellent support" may 
not be very good either, but BT supports RToL and i18n with help of Qt 
by default and has been translated to several languages.

But about the news - we have published our news in our web page but not 
in CrossWire. I have put announcements on sword-devel mailing list but 
haven't requested anyone to put them into the CrossWire news, and so 
they haven't gone there.


Offtopic: someone wanted a fixed sidebar and top bar for the web pages. 
I found my old JD Bible Bot pages which have a floating top bar (I don't 
remember how the side bar is created, but I have a floating one in the 
before mentioned page):
http://www.student.oulu.fi/~eekaikko/biblebot/jdbiblebot.html



--Eeli Kaikkonen