[seam-dev] Seam 3 space on JBoss Community

[Steve Ebersole]

On 03/23/2010 12:08 PM, Gavin King wrote:
 > Look, it's clear that we needed to migrate away from the old
 > hibernate.org infrastructure, which was on old PHP codebase abandoned
 > several years ago, and featured a lot of the same problems which annoy
 > me about the new site.
 >
 > But I think that it was a mistake to use the jboss.org infrastructure
 > instead of Seam Wiki, and I think that at the very least the switch
 > was flipped on the new site well before it was ready and had been
 > through a proper quality review. Here's a list of issues with the new
 > site:
Is the new site "perfect"?  No of course not.

However, I invited the needed people to review it and none did.  I 
cannot jump through the internet and make people care man.  I will say 
that launching was a great way to get people to care, huh?

But to claim that it should not have been moved to what you call a shit 
platform is retarded imo because it is moving from a shit platform.  And 
even worse, at the time the old site was a shit platform that  crashed 
regularly (we are required to have a total ghetto script in the 
background that monitors the site and if it becomes unresponsive restart 
the sevices).  Unfortunately JBoss.org is having problems too ever since 
the move, but in my defense they did not have the history of these 
issues prior to the move that the old hibernate.org site did

The only real question here is whether moving to seam based solution 
would have been "better".  Well lets see...  Who would have done this 
migration?  You and I and Christian and other folks sat in coffee shop 
in Atlanta nearly 3 years ago and talked about moving hibernate.org to 
seamframework.  3 years!  So obviously this was not a priority.  For me 
to do it (which you must admit is how this played out) I had to decide 
between having help (from the jboss community team) or doing it all 
myself (apparently) to migrate it to this esoteric seam based site.  I 
don't have the time.  Period.

 > ==
 >
 > * Navigation is much more complex.
 >
 > I count five, even six different menus on each page, two of which
 > contain pulldowns on some (but not all) menu items. These menus
 > interact in strange and unintuitive ways. For example, it's totally
 > non-obvious that the "Documentation" link takes you somewhere
 > different, depending upon which subproject you happen to have
 > selected. It's incredibly non-obvious how you get back to the main
 > "Hibernate" frontpage once you have clicked on a subproject.
 >
 > At various places in the site, for example, as soon as you navigate to
 > the wiki, you simply get lost in jboss.org, and the menu bar no longer
 > takes you back to hibernate.org! This is unprofessional, and I'm
 > amazed, after all the assurances that porting to the jboss.org
 > infrastructure would not affect the ability for the site to maintain
 > its own identity, that we have these kinds of basic problems.
 >
 > These problems seem to be the direct result of re-using what already
 > existed in jboss.org.
 >
 > At the time the site went live, there were a bunch of broken links,
 > though these now seem to be fixed. Also, users are complaining that
 > bookmarked links to content on the old site are now broken. These may
 > be just teething problems.
Your issue with the nav is consistency afaict.  Ok, perhaps.  Yet you 
argue about jboss.org constraining you.  You cannot have it both ways..

I am unaware of links not working when launched.  Someone mentioned nav 
links not working, but we have not touched those since launch.  So not 
sure what these were about.

I set up URL remaps of what I deemed likely-bookmarked content.  Did I 
miss some?  Probably.  For sure I missed the migration page.  However, I 
am not going to migrate every single wiki from the old site and set up 
remaps of each and every one of these URLs.  Aint gonna happen.

Yes the disjunction between projects in magnolia and sbs is not ideal. 
I wish there were a stronger tie between them both visually and inter-nav.

 > * The site is uglier than the old site, and has lost its identity.
 >
 > This is an aesthetic judgement, obviously, and perhaps not everyone
 > will agree. But after everyone has been assuring me for ages that *of
 > course* migrating to the jboss.org infrastructure would not affect our
 > ability to maintain our existing look/feel and identity, I'm extremely
 > surprised to find that the look and feel of the old hibernate page has
 > been borgified and now has a much blander and less distinctive
 > jboss.org-ified look.
Well I disagree.  I find the magnolia pages in particular have a *much 
much much much much much* better feel than the old site (the subprojects 
stuff on the rhs aside).  I am still working through the SBS stuff.

 > In particular, the wiki pages are just plain ugly, and don't look like
 > plain web pages. Just try compare a page from seamframework.org to a
 > page from the hibernate.org wiki side by side. One is beautiful, the
 > other is vomit.
First I am not happy with the LnF with the new wiki either.  But you 
need to look at this in 2 respects:

1) This SBS is more than just a wiki.  Its a collaborative system.  We 
have not yet migrated the forums over so a huge part of that 
collaboration is missing, granted.  SBS has a good tagging system (based 
on my experiece with the blog software anyway we do not; is that the 
same used for tagging in seam wiki?)  SBS has a good rating system to 
help bubble up useful content.  In SBS I can set up teams and groups and 
friends.  In SBS I have the usual notification mechanisms (you like RSS, 
cool, SBS has that too; but it also has email notifications which  some 
people prefer and which the seam site does not offer).

2) You are comparing apples and oranges when you compare the existing 
hibernate.org wiki to seamframework.org.  Dude I have zero (nada, nein, 
nyet) resources to throw at administering and maintaining this stuff. 
And about the same to do a migration.  So lets compare this validly: 
php versus jboss.org

 >
 > * Login is screwed up.
 >
 > I'm annoyed that my old hibernate.org credentials don't work. I'm even
 > more annoyed that logging in takes two clicks, and sends me to some
 > jboss.org page from which I have no chance to navigate back to the
 > hibernate.org page I was looking at (without using the back button).
 > This is just unprofessional.
 >
 > Again, this seems to be the result of using the jboss.org infrastructure.
Was unaware as I stay logged in to jboss.org.  Yes that's not cool.

 >
 > * Inconsistent look and feel across the website, wiki and forums.
 >
 > Unlike in Seam Wiki, the wiki and forum each have their own special
 > look and feel. The main pages of the site don't appear to be wiki
 > pages at all, which means that I have 3 different ways of authoring
 > and managing content depending upon where I am in the site. This is
 > just crappy, folks! I did not even find *any* way to edit the main
 > website pages via my web browser.
Again something that is *your* opinion.  I actually hated that the old 
site made no distinction between community content and "project pages". 
  The effect is that you can never know when you are on a page whether 
this is information maintained by the project team or some potentially 
off the wall post by some noob.  Just like your comment about community 
members, not all content is equal.

 >
 > * The search box takes me to Google.
 >
 > Perhaps I'm missing some "trick", but the search box does not seem to
 > search the site at all. It seems to just take me straight to Google,
 > and return me results from the whole internet.
Dunno.  Have not looked at that.  Its also strange that there are 2 
search boxes.

 >
 > ==
 >
 > These are just the things I noticed in a cursory inspection of the site.
 >
 > Now, perhaps some of these problems are fixable while remaining on the
 > jboss.org infrastructure. But seamframework.org does not have ANY of
 > these problems. And hibernate.org would not have these problems if we
 > would have used Seam Wiki, which was my recommendation at the time.
Yep, and again it was your recommendation 3 (!) years ago.

-- 
steve at hibernate.org
http://hibernate.org