cvs commit: www/share/sgml includes.navdevelopers.sgml

[Mark Linimon]

On Thu, Feb 23, 2006 at 11:34:50AM -0800, Murray Stokely wrote:
> I am saying that is not a good solution without additional changes
> because that will lead to lots of different ways to get to the same
> material and will clutter the navigation of the website.

I'm not 100% sure that having different ways to get to the same material
is really all that bad.  However, I agree the navigation hierarchy should
be as clean as possible.

> My proposals below describe ways to make this material accessible in
> fewer clicks than yours and with less clutter.

I think we can all agree on these goals.

> I want to add more direct links to the few useful items of information
> there that are not already available, instead of making people click
> through yet another layer to get to the policies documents and such
> that you speak of.

As the author of the last re-architecting of the main "internal" page let
me say that I'm all for this.  The work I did was IMHO necessary but
insufficient.  It pushed a few things down one level (good) but did not
complete the refactoring (sigh).

> Since there have never been links to this material from the main or
> other second level pages

I thought there were other cross-links from elsewhere in the site?

> I propose linking to the content you want, such as "Policies for
> FreeBSD Committers" prominently on the existing developer page.
> [...] When you click on "developers" from the front page you
> should get all information relevant for developers.  Right now, it
> takes you immediately to the in progress development projects, which
> is too narrow.  Some higher level information should be added to the
> top of that page with information about policies for committers (as
> you propose), and other information.  The FreeBSD Development projects
> can be pushed down further or made a third level page instead of the
> second page prime link real estate of 'Developers' that it currently
> occupies.

If we change "Developers" to "Development" I think pushing the projects
down makes more sense, and might shift the emphasis more towards the
process and the product (of interest to users) than the people (primarily
of interest to the people themselves).  e.g. break the links up into
who/what/where/when:

Development -> release engineering (when)
Development -> current projects (what)
Development -> developer policies (who)
Development -> development resources (where)

The resources would probably only be of interest to current developers,
but it _might_ be to prospective developers.  (I know that I read through
all those pages when I was figuring out if I wanted to get more involved.)
The policies IMHO are _definitely_ of interest to prospective developers.

As for the part about "obsolete/misleading information", again IMHO, that
stuff just needs to be either deleted or stuffed onto a page saying
"historical documents in need of updating."  It makes the project look
less active than it is (nothing is more stupid than seeing a web page
referring to information from 2002 calling it "just released").  Yes, I
am willing to do some work on pruning those things (and also projects/,
which suffers from the same problem).

Lastly, if there is information that truly needs to be internal to the
project (I am not aware of any), then it shouldn't be in the www/ tree
to start with, since anyone can cvs a copy of that tree.

mcl