13 Oct
2009
13 Oct
'09
7:13 p.m.
On Sun, Sep 27, 2009 at 1:01 PM, Vincent Massol <vincent(a)massol.net> wrote:
Hi there,
I'd like to start a overhaul of the xwiki.org home page + a first
level navigation overhaul.
Today:
* Home page = list the different products
* First level nav = the ecosystem panel
Problems:
* We now have a single product: XE and all the others are actually
modules that plugin into the main products. Hence we shouldn't focus
on other products so much IMO.
* I'd like to view xwiki.org as a forge of projects. Today our top
level projects are the ones listed here: http://svn.xwiki.org/svnroot/xwiki/
* The main page should be more dynamic and show some news and activity
instead of being static
* People are confused by the top level navigation vs the second level
one because they both use panels and it's not easy to differentiate them
Proposal:
* Use a horizontal top level navigation with the following items (from
left to right):
- Overview or Home (the main page)
- Platform
- Projects (when clicked will list all top level projects) - We could
have the list of subproject available as submenu items too (as it's
done on http://jboss.org/)
I'd differentiate the platform from the others if we were talking
about products, since we're talking about projects I think platform is
one of them (it also reflects our top level projects).
- Support (when clicked will explain the various ways
to get support
including mailing list/forum, irc/jabber, FAQ & listing companies
offering commercial support)
- Contribute or Community (when clicked we'll get dev.xwiki.org)
- Playground
I'm not sure about playground since playground is about XE and not the
other projects, I'd put it on the homepage but not in the tabs.
I'd add "Downloads" and "Extensions" (code.xwiki.org).
This means that the panels on the right will become the second level
navigation and the content will depend completely on where you are on
the site.
* Have some facilities links in the header on the right:
- News
- Downloads (as a visible button maybe)
Not sure about putting links in the header, I'd prefer to keep it simple.
Putting downloads in the tabs and "news" (or blog) on the homepage
would do the trick.
* On the home page:
- Have a nice diagram of the xwiki platform that shows how XE, XE
modules are positioned on the platform so that people understand right
away that xwiki is a collaborative web dev platform
-1 about putting a tech diagram on the homepage, I'd rather put this
diagram under "Projects", techies interested by this info will click
on "Projects" soon enough I think :) I'd rather put a little
screenshot gallery (a carousel) showing XWiki projects key features on
the homepage.
- Have a Highlight box with XE so that users looking
for a full-
fledged wiki can quickly see it and click on it + maybe one featured
screenshot of an entry from the References page that would be
different every time the page is refreshed (this could encourage
people to add references + provide a link to the references directly)
- Have a Featured project box and list 3-4 featured projects (XE, XEM,
XEclipse, XOffice for ex to start with)
- Have some news:
-- latest 5 blog post titles
-- latest 5 code zone additions (all snippet, plugins, macro, apps,
etc included)
-- latest 5 mailing list threads subjects (with links to our nabble
forum)
I wonder if it would not be too much, we need to see what it would look like.
We could not have any second level navigation for the
home page in
order to have more space for displaying the elements above.
+1
If/when we're ok in term of content maybe Cati (or anyone interested)
could provide some mockups of what it could look like.
I'm interested, actually I've started to work on mockups at
http://incubator.myxwiki.org/xwiki/bin/view/XWikiOrgRedesign/
Note that it is a very early draft, for example there's only one level
of tabs FTM.
Thanks,
JV.