[sword-devel] Bible Software Review

[Chris Little]

Eeli Kaikkonen wrote:
> It could help if you or someone else wrote a list of the wanted features
> of a complete Sword frontend. I have hands full of work while porting
> BibleTime to Qt4 but I have still implemented quite much new features or
> code and could do it in the future, too.

Excellent idea. I made a wiki article stub at 
http://www.crosswire.org/wiki/index.php/Frontends:FeatureList. I hope 
others will join me in filling what they hope to see in frontends 
(current and future).

> sword-support works quite well (though could do even better) but I think
> the problem is how the support is advertised. We have had several
> discussion about the structure of the website. I don't blame people if
> they find it difficult to find certain email addresses, link or
> something other there. The forums is the more serious problem and I
> think Chris remembers how I feel about it - my comment was almost
> identical to that of the review writer. Honestly, I really think Chris
> is wrong here. I have used different kinds of forums and know how they
> should work, and the Sword forum is NOT active or attractive.

I agree with the reviewer about the lack of visibility of the forum, so 
I put a link into the top link bar of the website. Now you can access 
the forums from wherever you are.

I feel we need some kind of user forum. That can be a bulletin board, 
like the current forums. And I like that style because it is persistent 
and easy to search. Another possibility would be a mailing list with 
archiving on CrossWire. (If we take that route, I would recommend 
changing sword-devel into sword-users and creating a new sword-devel.) 
That sort of system works well for the e-Sword user groups, Unicode & 
ICU, many sourceforge projects, etc. I don't really have an opinion 
here. But if moving to a mailing list would be more likely to facilitate 
discussion and encourage developers to answer non-developers' questions, 
then I would encourage us to take that route.

> Again, I think our website is the key issue here. Just see the plethora
> of websites of modern projects (software of other) and you notice that
> "Forums" is one of the most visible links in the home page. People are
> used to that and can't find our forums easily.

Like I mentioned, I made the forums much more visible yesterday. We 
could try it out with the new link for a month or so and then 
re-evaluate after that before making any other changes.

--Chris