[seam-dev] Seam 3 space on JBoss Community

[Gavin King]

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