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

[Ben Kaduk]

On 2/23/06, Mark Linimon <linimon at lonesome.com> wrote:
> 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
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>

I like this idea -- I am considering becoming more involved with the
FreeBSD project, and most of my decisions will be based on reading the
website.  Until the discussion in this thread, I did not even know
that there were "internal" pages on the website, but they will be very
helpful in my decision.

Ben Kaduk