[seam-dev] Seam 3 space on JBoss Community

[Gavin King]

Another problem: the URL of all wiki pages looks like:

   http://community.jboss.org/en/hibernate/search

instead of:

   http:/hibernate.org/search

This may be a fixable teething problem.

On Tue, Mar 23, 2010 at 1:08 PM, Gavin King <gavin.king at gmail.com> 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:
>
> ==
>
> * 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.
>
> * 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.
>
> 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.
>
> * 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.
>
> * 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.
>
> * 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.
>
> ==
>
> 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.
>
> On Mon, Mar 22, 2010 at 12:54 PM, Steve Ebersole <steve at hibernate.org> wrote:
>>
>> I just want to point out that I am not happy with Hibernate.org.  However I
>> am not sure yet whether I am less happy with it now than I was with the old
>> site.  Gavin you are seriously the only person I have come across that
>> actually liked that old site.  The search sucked.  Admin sucked.  It was a
>> total pain to author content.  The security "model" was atrocious.  Contact
>> me off list if you need the rest of this list.
>>
>> Was it great that we controlled it?  Well that's a two-sided question.  Of
>> course it was awesome that we got free reign over developing and designing
>> it.  But the downside is/was maintaining it both in terms of administering
>> the machine and keeping the site software patched etc.  Its this second
>> aspect where the old site was largely an epic fail.  Its the single reason
>> we continued to use completely outdated software that eventually led to the
>> security incidents that started all the outages with hibernate.org.  The php
>> wiki was absolute poopoo no matter what your rose-colored glasses want to
>> have you remember.
>>
>> I am not going to speak about y'alls current site.  I was not involved in
>> it, nor do I ever go there.  So its not appropriate for me to speak about
>> it.
>>
>> Someone pointed out some supposed issues with the new hibernate site.  Well
>> the quick links are working and have always been working afaik.  The tools
>> page is how max wanted it; all the "missing nav links" are actually part of
>> the page itself.  Yes there is not a good way to link back to the magnolia
>> pages from the sbs pages, because the jboss.org infrastructure does not
>> recgnize an association between the 2.
>>
>> I personally welcome any *constructive* criticism of the hibernate.org
>> setup.  In fact we are discussing changes as I write this.
>>
>> --
>> View this message in context: http://old.nabble.com/Seam-3-space-on-JBoss-Community-tp27950629p27989245.html
>> Sent from the seam-dev mailing list archive at Nabble.com.
>>
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>
>
>
> --
> Gavin King
> gavin.king at gmail.com
> http://in.relation.to/Bloggers/Gavin
> http://hibernate.org
> http://seamframework.org
>



-- 
Gavin King
gavin.king at gmail.com
http://in.relation.to/Bloggers/Gavin
http://hibernate.org
http://seamframework.org