[Xerte-dev] Re: Community Website

[Julian Tenney]

I just don't think it reflects the quality of the rest of the work adequately to serve as a shop window. You can still launch it, and it can continue to evolve, and we can all start to use it, and drive traffic to it. I am keen to see this a success. My honest opinion is that at present it needs more work.

I would like to re-skin toolkits and lose the old brown theme, and I think the community site can have a better look and feel than it does at the moment, and I think it would be nice if we made the two work together, but when Nuno applied these styles to the toolkits application, it looked bad: so I would rather spend the time and get the skinning right for toolkits, and then apply that to the community site, rather than the other way around.

I understand there will be a range of styles of writing, but that's not the same as typography. The pages are highly inconsistent in the use of headings, formatting, etc, and that, to me is not consistent with the quality of web professionals we have in this group.

From: Alistair McNaught [mailto:Alistair.McNaught at HEAcademy.ac.uk]
Sent: 25 April 2013 13:57
To: Julian Tenney; For Xerte technical developers (xerte-dev at lists.nottingham.ac.uk)
Cc: Inge Donkervoort 12Change (i.donkervoort at 12change.eu); 'Fay Cross' (Fay.Cross at nottingham.ac.uk); Nuno Jorge (Nuno.Jorge at nottingham.ac.uk)
Subject: RE: Community Website

That's very odd - I can't replicate those issues (except the typography styles - that's a consequence of things being written by different people at different times and not yet having evolved a style guide).

The whole point - to me - about a community site is that it will evolve. If we're encouraging community wider contribution we'll need to accept a level of stylistic difference. I'm not getting any jumping around of panels etc and I'm finding all the resources I expected to on the Resources page.

I think the question of whether a community site is ready to be launched is a question for the community to decide and this little bit of the community in southern England feels the benefits of the site for new users far outweigh any current problems. What does the rest of the community feel?

We were planning on launching the site to the public tomorrow so a consensus (or at least a quorum) view would be welcome sooner rather than later!

Alistair



From: Julian Tenney [mailto:Julian.Tenney at nottingham.ac.uk]
Sent: 25 April 2013 13:41
To: For Xerte technical developers (xerte-dev at lists.nottingham.ac.uk<mailto:xerte-dev at lists.nottingham.ac.uk>)
Cc: Alistair McNaught; Inge Donkervoort 12Change (i.donkervoort at 12change.eu<mailto:i.donkervoort at 12change.eu>); 'Fay Cross' (Fay.Cross at nottingham.ac.uk<mailto:Fay.Cross at nottingham.ac.uk>); Nuno Jorge (Nuno.Jorge at nottingham.ac.uk<mailto:Nuno.Jorge at nottingham.ac.uk>)
Subject: Community Website

I have to say, I'm not sure the community web site is ready for public consumption. If I go there now, the links are all inconsistent and wrap badly, the login box isn't aligned, I couldn't find the downloads, and I'm just not very happy with the way it looks. When you navigate around the pages, the panels jump about. There is inconsistent typography in headings, margins, line breaks and font sizes, the resources page doesn't contain any resources, the resource panel is repeated on both the showcases and resources page, the FAQ page has styles all of its own and there's a ton other stuff: it's all just a bit of a mess if you ask me.

I'm not putting down the work that has gone into it, but I know we can do a lot better than this: it just doesn't feel finished, and it doesn't inspire me with confidence in the tools.

At the moment I would prefer to put v2.0 on the main Xerte web site and direct people there, and we can continue working on the community site now we've got this tranche of development work out of the way. We can re-visit the styling of the application as well at the same time, and make the two work together: Nuno applied the same set of styles to toolkits this week, and it didn't work very well.

So here's my recommendation: we put v2.0 on the Xerte site as we always have done (or link directly from there to Tom's zip, without letting the user see the community site if they follow the link from www.nottingham.ac.uk/xerte<http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/xerte>: they just get the downloaded zip). Then we properly finish the community site, and re-skin toolkits in the next batch of work.




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