[sword-devel] CrossWire news

[Peter von Kaehne]

Thanks Greg and Jonathan,

On 14/02/11 02:00, Jonathan Morgan wrote:

> I'm not sure if there is any good way to improve this, but when I look
> at that page it is not clear to me what those three columns mean. 

There is of course the possibility to add a title for each column. Will see.

> The next thing I see (looking first at the left hand column) is that the
> most recent news item is from 2009. 

Yes. There is some method in this though:

1) Some news will age slower than others - we release the engine only
every year or so once and I guess as things mature this rate will not
change much. Modules are frequently released and frontends vary.

2) Once an individual project updates their news the older news items of
the same project will disappear - not just slide down. So, as soon as
you put something in about BpBible all old stuff on BpBible is going
out, etc.

The upside of all this is that no project will drown out all others, the
downside is that slow releasing projects have older items up. And if
projects will not do any updating then the overall appearance is stale.
But that was the same in the past.

>  A simple reverse chronological news feed might not be the
> universal best solution, but it is at least something casual visitors
> are likely to understand.

We had that of course for years and it was no good for us. We had a news
page which showed 3 or so releases of one particular frontend and not
much else recent.

The main difficulty is the disparate release schedules lead to very
skewed news. I am releasing at the moment frequently modules. If every
module would lead to a news item (as it should) all engine and all
frontend releases would be bottom. And that is no good. There are some
different aspects of our work and the separation into three areas -
core, modules and frontends makes sense. Whether it needs more
highlighting by a title for each column - fair enough.

> In the same vein, newer news might be a good thing.  I'm sure this is
> largely the fault of frontend developers (like me) not adding news
> items, but I'm sure BibleTime 2.5, PocketSword 1.0, BPBible 0.4.3, and
> Xiphos 3.0 are not the latest versions available, and the 2009 date on
> the news items makes that rather clear.

Exactly - and as said above - we all need to touch our noses here -
certainly I. But the new page makes it actually easier to have the
latest news on one's own project up and visible.

Peter