[Pydotorg-redesign] Re: [Pydotorg] keep reorganization discussion on pydotorg-redesign?

[Fred L. Drake, Jr.]

Kevin Altis writes:
 > Shouldn't the discussion of reorganizing the top nav and sub-pages stay on
 > pydotorg-redesign? This is part of the overall redesign process and many of
 > the people on the other list are not part of the current pydotorg
 > maintainers list.

That's reasonable.

 > Also, we probably want to avoid too much churn. If we start making changes
 > to the top nav, help, etc. that are going to be live on python.org then we
 > should go ahead and decide on the process for agreeing on the changes so we
 > can avoid backing them out later.
 >
 > We said we would do mockups and get some general agreement for the home page
 > and sitewide style changes, but are going to apply that to the other
 > reorganization bits like the new community page? I don't want to kill the
 > momentum AMK has going, so let's decide quickly. I'm mostly bringing this up
 > because the top nav is now a topic.

There's a real tension here, I think.  Everyone involved has the goal
of a better site, but different people approach it differently.  The
incremental approach Andrew is taking has the advantage that the
results of the effort are immediate and site visitors can take
advantage of them immediately.  The planning-first approach allows a
considered attack on the problem of organization on the site, and
avoids minor churn in favor of a single (really big) churn.

Clearly both have merits.  The best, of course, is whichever gives us
a new site.  ;-)

So the incremental approach appears to be winning for the
organizational aspect:  Andrew is chugging right along making changes
as he sees fit, with input from others when time is available.

If we want to approach site organization with the plan-first approach,
someone needs to take the time to write up and propose a new site
map.  With that in hand, it'll be easier to make the changes needed to
implement the new organization.  Maybe someone is working on this, but
I don't recall hearing about it.  This would be a good place for a
volunteer to announce their intentions and to post a proposal.

I consider the site organization discussion to be separate from the
site design discussion, though they are closely related.  I'm hoping
that the bulk of the changes needed to implement a new design can be
made by changing the stylesheets and templating support (what's
currently done in HT2HTML), and doing as little as possible in the
content itself.


  -Fred

-- 
Fred L. Drake, Jr.  <fdrake at acm.org>
PythonLabs at Zope Corporation