On pon, cze 17, 2019 at 11:08 PM, Vinzenz Vietzke
Hi there,
being relatively new to the openSUSE community over the past few weeks I've been digging through websites and wiki. Quite often I stepped into traps of unclear, misleading or just plain old content. This lead me to the conclusion that there's urgent need of restructuring lots of things.
The following is a rough braindump strongly intended as RFC. I try to visualize my thoughts as good as possible with screenshots.
# First sight
The website opensuse.org in overall is looking good and I really like the coloring. But looking closer there is a lot of clutter which needs to be restructured.
Important stuff needs to be visible at first glimpse. See the screenshot taken on a regular FullHD monitor [1] and try to tell what's this all about - imagining you don't know what openSUSE is. Why not tell at first sight: - this is a Linux distribution - this is how it looks like - these three things make it outstanding
Positive examples as comparison: Fedora [2], Solus [3]
I did start doing some work towards getting first mockups of website going, but focus more on the `openSUSE` than distributions, leaving the marketing of distros to software-o-o. I do believe this is the right direction, because if we wanted to sell openSUSE right on the main site, we would not be able to mention anything outside of it in enough detail. Distributions are massive in terms of what we should actually mention about them, so software-o-o could serve the purposes of showcasing the distributions, installation process, go into detail about differences between Leap and Tumbleweed. It would also be nice to have a dns rule for the distribution part of the site instead of software-o-o/distributions, maybe something like get.openSUSE.org, so it's shorter and easier to type by anybody that wants to share the distros (but not the entire project) with other people ;)
# Getting information
To get more details I have to scroll quite a lot and/or click very often in comparison to the amount of information I get in the end. The waste of space is too high and it should be reduced. Also these animations are quite annoying. Especially the bouncing circle when clicking on "How to contribute" > "Code" just to show a few sentences afterwards.
Absolutely, animations aren't just a nice eye candy there, they function very often as a roadblock between person and information, which is not acceptable, I would be much more in favour of splitting some stuff into subpages just to get into enough detail about everything too.
# Consolidate information
## News
News about ongoing development and information about achievements is one the crucial thing to be spead out widely. The "News" section on opensuse.org is just way too small and is just drowned out by the "Tools" and "Contribute" sections. So we should either remove it there completely and give it a separate page (See Solus Blog [4]). Or move it upwards on opensuse.org and make it way more prominent. At least linking to news.opensuse.org is useless and should be stopped (even more from a design perspective).
Currently there are way too many places just to get news. Let me summarize it and - please correct me if I got something wrong:
1. opensuse.org It grabs first 2-3 sentences of a post and links to it on news.o.o.
2. news.opensuse.org This filled by Doug and (just guessing) members of news mailing list.
And news-o-o is the only official place for openSUSE news, I am hoping that new news-o-o [1] will be able to replace the wordpress site with something that will be way easier to contribute to through github prs. As for the news widget, I am glad it exists, it's an easy way to learn that the project isn't dead yet ;)
3. lizards.opensuse.org Looks exactly the same as news.o.o but consists of blog posts by devs and dev teams. The difference to news.o.o is stated nowhere, the reasons for this separation not made clear either.
Dead basically, I am still waiting for provo to get the stuff off there, it tends to be a long process (also YaST team needs blog on our infra, which is being worked on).
4. planet.opensuse.org This looks only slightly similar to news.o.o and lizards.o.o, even the content is different. But: why is dimstar's blog (the TW reviews) and the Open Build Service blog listed there? Following the logic above it should at least be in lizards.o.o if not even in news.o.o!
This is a news aggregator, from multiple contributors, it allows anybody to add their own blog to the sources, which is why it will be replacing lizards (it's way easier to have own blog with something like github/gitlab pages too, so it makes more sense, while it requires less maintenance from our side, even though it would be nice to drop python2 there too, contributors wanted!) [2].
## Website vs. Wiki
Looking at the content of opensuse.org and wiki.opensuse.org I think there's no clear plan what to put where. My understand of a wiki is a) collaboratively created content and b) content changing regularly. A source for documentation if you will.
I believe the biggest mistake was separating contents between openSUSE and SDB namespaces, when you are looking for software, you are most likely also looking for tutorials on how to install and use said software anyway. There is no particular reason why this needs to be in SDB articles in most cases.
The "Contribute" section on opensuse.org gives you just a few sentences but links to a wiki page. This is unnecessary as the ways to contribute won't hardly change very often. I assume this is mostly done due to the fact that opensuse.org has hardly any space left for slightly more detailed information. But that's what a website is made for. Sending people from URL to URL without giving them a consistent layout is at best confusing if not frustrating.
The contributions side of things is being worked on by Imad Aldoj, with a dedicated website for helping newcomers with contributions.
Partly positive example: Fedora [5] (sat in comparison to opensuse.org)
A better example: https://whatcanidoforfedora.org/en/
That's all for now. I understand that many things have somehow grown over the years. But as I'm willing to tackle these I am looking forward to your comments/critics.
Regards, vinz.
[1] https://opensuse.github.io/news-o-o/ [2] https://github.com/openSUSE/planet.opensuse.org LCP [Stasiek] https://lcp.world -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, email: opensuse-project+owner@opensuse.org