On 07 Feb 2003 20:35:20 +0100, Niklas <scizzo@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > I have done a small test design based on the design that drc has done > and also drc has helped me to make the test developers site look good > with the changing of colors and images. The test site can be located > here: http://devel.helloween.kicks-ass.org/ That looks nice. That design looks vaguely familiar... ;-) I am not sure that the front page should have some kind of news, though. Having up-to-date information for the main site will be hard enough. History shows that everybody is excited at first and supplies a lot of news, but this slows down after a while and it is difficult to keep the site alive. So it would probably be better to keep the news part for the main site only. The home page of the developers' site would only have a set of links to the important sections of the site, even if this duplicates some parts of the navigation bar. > But remember that this is a test design. Now I know that Raphaël wants > to do the scripts so I have a suggestion: I can do the design and > Raphaël can do the scripts and the content of the site. > > What do you think Raphaël? That's fine for me. There are only a few requirements that I would like to put on the design: - It should be clean XHTML 1.0 (or at least HTML 4.01). It looks like this is already the case. - The page design should not include too many images or complex (D)HTML stuff. Again, it looks like this is fine already. - There should be some kind of revision control system (such as CVS) for the contents of the pages. This reduces potential problems if there is more than one webmaster for the pages. - For those editing the pages, the contents should be clearly separated from the template. This means that all source files should only contain the body of the pages (without header, footer or navigation bar) and some build system should be able to apply the template to these source files to generate the final HTML pages. (*) - The source files (under revision control) and generated files should be in different directories. Ideally, it should be possible to rebuild everything by typing "make" in the source directory. - The generated HTML files should be static: no server-side includes, PHP, Perl or other fancy stuff that would put additional requirements on the server. - It should be possible to integrate some pages that are not using the same templates. This will be useful for the documentation pages generated by gtk-doc. So if this is fine for you, then I would be happy to work together with you on the update of the developers' site. > And I would also like to thank drc with the help of my weird ideas. I see that the footer of the sample page that you provided includes a reference to "The GIMP Team". I don't know how others feel about that, but I do not like to give credits on every page of the site. The GIMP itself does not include a "credits" entry at the bottom of every menu and those who really want to know who contributed to the GIMP have to locate the appropriate entry. Similary, I do not think that it is necessary to include a copyright notice and a link to a list of contributors on every page. Besides the fact that I do not like to advertise the credits too much, I think that such a list if often biased. It is hard to keep a "fair" credits list up-to-date, whether it is for the site or for the program as we have seen in the discussions a couple of weeks ago. In many Free Software projects (programs, documentation, web sites, etc.) the list of contributors is often "historical" and those who came later or who prefer to keep a low profile and work in the background are often under-represented. I don't know if having a biased list is better than having no list at all. Maybe it is. But since I am aware of this unavoidable bias, I prefer keep the list in a place that can be found by those who are looking for it, but without advertising it on every page. I have the same opinion for the main site, by the way. There is a list of people on http://www.gimp.org/the_gimp_org_about.html - It is incredibly inaccurate (more than half of the people mentioned there have not contributed a single line of code in the last year) but it is there for historical reasons. It is not advertised from the other pages. I hope that the new design will not put too much emphasis on the credits list or on a copyright notice. -Raphaël (*) The source files (HTML or XML) may contain some special meta tags or special comments that are recognized by the script that builds the final HTML pages and can be used to set some parameters. For example, that would be useful if we want to highlight the current section in the navigation bar or if some pages should use a slightly different template. I don't know if we really need such parameters in the source files, but this could be useful.
