[Pydotorg-redesign] Re: [Pydotorg] keep reorganization discussionon pydotorg-redesign?

[Tim Parkin]

Fred wrote:
>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.  ;-)

I, personally, have no problems with an incremental approach as long as
this does not place limitations on the scope of a pre-planned redesign.
However these limitations may occur, they can only act to the detriment
of the results of a global re-organisation.

>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.

We've obviously expressed an interest in taking this further. In
addition to the creation of the design, there is a proposed top-level
navigation that we would love to get some feedback on
(http://www.pollenation.net/assets/public/redesign-notes.txt) I realise
this is only a set of notes along with a proposal, but hopefully it's a
start. At the end of the day the designs suggested need some further
work to ensure compatibility with as many browsers as possible and so a
decision needs to be made on which will be implemented before that work
takes place.

>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. 

I've missed out on whatever threads have taken place on the pydotorg
mailing list. I've applied for inclusion and will check the archives
when I can. Until that point I can't really comment on what has taken
place so far. Obviously the re-organisation will have an incredible
impact on usability. If we're keeping these things separate, which list
should discussions of site wide navigation versus contextual navigation
take place in and ditto for discussion of search related matters.

Regardless of those discussions, however, it would be of great benefit
to be able to write a script/tool to extract all of the content and
remove all 'location' from it (ie links would be pageid's only) in this
way it would be a simple matter to re-map to any configuration. If this
tool also dumped the output back into HT2HTML format then the site could
be reorganised at any point and under whatever reasoning. This
ultimately means there is a route to react to feedback upon launch of a
beta site. What do people think?

Tim Parkin
Pollenation Internet
tim at pollenation.net