[seam-dev] Seam 3 space on JBoss Community

[Emmanuel Bernard]

Hi,
As Steve said, we are discussing ways to make the new hibernate.org better. Gavin asked me to post my wish list here as it would likely apply to the seam website migration assuming that happens. Not everyone agrees with this list but that's food for thoughts.

Here is my dream list in decreasing priority wrt a community website. This feedback is directly influenced by the hibernate.org migration and by what's missing / not necessarily trivial to do on the Magnolia / Jive SBS combo. Some are doable, some are not, in any case you don't get them for free.

o a way to understand navigation
I can navigate from one hibernate project to an other using the vertical menu but there is no visual indication on where I am on the menu itself (I know via the big logo banner but it's in a completely different page area and feel like another level of hierarchy).
The vertical bar does give you that *sometimes*: when in "documentation" or "build", the element is highlighted in a brighter gray. At least for it's level one ( we lose sub levels unfortunately). Also its does not seem to work for overview, downloads etc
Also as Lincoln was mentioning, I have no "bring me home dad" button or logo so I am forced to edit my URL and type it back.

So at the end of the day, I don't know where I am nor how to go back where I was. I feel insecure.

o A unique L&F between the wiki and the project pages. 
Today I feel like I leave the hibernate space and join the jboss.org space (logo gone, project navigation gone, same type of vertical nav bar but with different features). I even have a subnav in French while the rest is in English.

o a unique navigation
Today we have two orthogonal navigation schemes, the subsection banner (horizontal nav) and the subprojects as vertical. But logically 
today, the projects are the level 1 nav and the subsections level 2 and contextual to the subproject.

o a working search engine(s)

Ideally a single search engine would be much better than two in a given page and four different behaviors overall.

When on magnolia, the search engine is plain Google:
- lose visual consistency
- lose navigation
- get results from outside hibernate.org (or even jboss.org)

The wiki search is different:
- we stay on the website
- search results seem a bit uneven: 
  . when searching for Hibernate Search on the wiki, you don't get the space in the results (I know you get it on a different box on the right but it's a different area and it seems you can get spaces in the result - see below).
  . the top result is a 2007 year old post with no answer
  . when searching on the top search box (ie the jboss community one), results are different

o stability
Today I have a lot of either:
- "the website is in maintenance" image when clicking on hibernate search or validator wiki subspace (around 50% of the time)
- "service temporarily unavailable" randomly
I'd also love a magnolia author site that's faster in Europe. The edit and preview loop is around 30 seconds minimum (no live view). Same for the page pushing process.
 - I randomly get quite slow page rendering (plain magnolia site)

o minor
 Webpages have fugly URLs:
 - on magnolia, you get .html despite the fact that these are dynamic pages.
 - you lose the website name in the wiki as everything is redirected to http://community.jboss.org/wiki
 SEO:
 - I am not certain the SEO strategy is quite ready on the Magnolia / Jive SBS combo. For sure the multiple URL roots don't help.

On 22 mars 2010, at 17:54, Steve Ebersole 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
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> 
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