Eep. I have over 150k of mail about the gimp webpage now. Here's a first reply to _some_ of it: On Wed, May 23, 2001 at 04:20:00AM -0400, Michael Spunt wrote: > I tried some stuff ony my own, too. Maybe you would like to have a > look at it: > http://www.technoid.f2s.com/gimp.org/index.php That's a neat design, but you're doing all this funky stylesheet stuff that leaves me with a bad font! Please don't change my font on me! Also, what's with this? http://www.technoid.f2s.com/gimp.org/index.php?nav=doc A query in the URL for a static document?? On Sat, May 19, 2001 at 09:09:55AM +0200, Raphael Quinet wrote: > Well, this looks interesting but I do not know if such a design is > appropriate for a Gimp site. Your design is modern/futuristic, but > these characteristics are not directly related to image editing, > painting, or graphics in general. Someone who comes to the site > without knowing what the Gimp is about (e.g., a Windows user who > clicked on a button "Graphics by Gimp" on some other web page) would > probably not think that she just loaded a page describing an image > editing program. It would be better if the home page could show > some paintbrushes, color palettes, maybe some photorealistic images > (but the page should not be too "heavy"), and of course our friend > Wilber. These things could easily be associated with what the Gimp > is about. I have purposely _not_ applied any significant design to the stuff I've been working on - I'm expecting someone to come up with a better one, eventually. I've just chosen the general geometry of the page. Just a matter of changing a few template files. > Anyway, I am not sure that a completely new design for the Gimp site > is necessary. It would be nice, but upating the presentation is > IMHO much less urgent than updating the contents. There are many > broken links to external sites, incomplete information for > developers, outdated descriptions of the Gimp's features, ... If > someone has the time to update both the layout and the contents (and > to keep on maintaining the site for a while), then I am all for it. > But if nobody has enough time to do both, then updating the layout > should not delay the long-awaited updates of the contents. Design and contents are two completely separate things in my world. I suppose I could rearrange my templates to look more like the current site :) > In addition to some of the things mentioned in Christoph's TODO list, > I would like to add a couple of things that should avoided for the > Gimp's web site: > > * The new layout should not break the existing URLs. Many people have > bookmarked some pages on www.gimp.org, and many web sites have > direct links to the download pages, to the documentation or to the > mailing lists page. So even if the navigation system is redesigned, > there should still be something available from the same URLs as > today. Yes, mod_rewrite can do this. I am into directory hierarchies and organizing information, but I agree that we should not break any existing URLs. > * The design should be fast and clean. It should support all browsers > and should not make excesssive use of nested tables or JavaScript. > The current design of www.gimp.org is OK from that point of view. > But on the other hand, the GUG site is taking too long to render in > Netscape 4 (2-3 seconds of delay for re-displaying any page, because > of the nested tables). I think my stuff is pretty quick - works in Lynx and w3m quite nicely, too. > * The pages should be easy to bookmark and the URLs should not be too > long. This means that frames are forbidden, and the systems that > generate dynamic contents using horribly long URLs should also be > avoided (see the bad examples from Corel below). Very much agreed. On Wed, May 23, 2001 at 02:46:24PM +0200, Christoph Rauch wrote: > Raphael Quinet schrieb: > > and the systems that generate dynamic contents using horribly > > long URLs should also be avoided (see the bad examples from Corel > > below). > There is always mod_rewrite. This way we can "beautify" the URLs, > without disturbing functionality from the developer side. Actually, in my system, all of my URLs are _already_ nice and clean, with full functionality. :) Compare: http://www.technoid.f2s.com/gimp.org/index.php?nav=doc&page=tutorials http://wilber.gimp.org:8192/docs/user/tutorials/ Why _create_ ugly URLs? Why not just make them pretty in the first place? On Wed, May 23, 2001 at 03:32:13PM +0200, Raphael Quinet wrote: > > > and the systems that generate dynamic contents using horribly > > > long URLs should also be avoided (see the bad examples from > > > Corel below). > > There is always mod_rewrite. This way we can "beautify" the URLs, > > without disturbing functionality from the developer side. > Yes, of course. But it could be even better if most of the site > could be based on static files that are generated once (by applying > some templates around the CVS files), so that the pages do not have > to be re-generated for every request. This reduces the load on the > server, and more importantly this ensures that all pages can be > cached, both in the user's browser cache and in large caching > proxies. My stuff does this :) > Most information that is provided on the gimp.org web site is static > anyway. It does not need to be updated frequently (except for the > news section, but even that is not updated more than once per day) > and we do not need dynamic elements. This could change if we > introduce a web-based discussion forum or some online polls, but > there is already the GUG site for that so this is not needed on the > main gimp site. So I think that a system that generates static > pages from a set of templates would be well suited to the gimp.org > web site. As far as I know, this is already what is done, even if > it is done by a collection of dirty hacks. Yes, and I believe that my hacks are a little bit less dirty, and easier for content editors to work with. Feel free to explore stuff at: http://wilber.gimp.org:8192/aux/ > So I do not care if nobody says: "Wow, what a nice design!" when > viewing the gimp.org site, but I hope that many will say: "Wow, I > did not know that I could do this with the Gimp!" or even: "Wow, > this Gimp program seems to be easier to use and more powerful than > my current software." For example: I have a GIMP process on wilber that generates title images, and of course they are only made the first time a new page is loaded. I think that's pretty nifty. Can Photoshop do that? :) On Wed, May 23, 2001 at 10:23:57AM -0500, Miles O'Neal wrote: > I know, I know. Since we're probably going to rewrite the site in > something less arcane and more known, now is the ideal time to > revamp the look and feel. Let's just make sure it's worth the > effort, and we don't lose things - like the top notch menu system, > etc. What do you think of the nav at http://wilber.gimp.org:8192/links/ Miles? On Wed, May 23, 2001 at 02:35:28PM -0400, Adrian Likins wrote: > I'm not picky about the backend, the language, the look, etc. I > think the primary goal should be to make it easy to keep the content > up to date, and make adding/editing content as easy as possible. The > perceived difficulty in keeping content up to date was the downfall > of the old site. I like to think that the stuff I've thrown together satisifes these goals quite well. The template language is purposely limited - in particular, it's not Turing complete (unless you count the Perl callbacks). The navigation is generated by a script that traverses all of the static pages (plus pages from the database!), so adding a page is a simple matter of making a new file and putting some content in it. Right now the navigation generator has to be run manually but there's no reason it couldn't be run as a cron job or whenever someone checks a new file into CVS. Anyway if you want to stare at the code or the raw input pages they're all visible at: http://wilber.gimp.org:8192/aux/ Cheers, Tom -- Tom Rathborne tomr@xxxxxxxxxxxx http://www.aceldama.com/~tomr/ | I know I've made some very poor decisions recently, but I can give you my | H complete assurance that my work will be back to normal. I've still got the | A greatest enthusiasm and confidence in the mission, and I want to help you. | L
