Re: Fixing pango.org

[Owen Taylor <otaylor redhat com>]

Owen Taylor wrote:

> Hmmm. Interesting. I like the moving of the site navigation to the 
> side; but the left sidebar is a little big and cluttered. 
>
> Going from the "Clean" theme - what is on wiki.pango.org now, I think
> the changes I'd like to see are:
>
>  - Move site navigation (what is currently 4 tabs at the top) to 
>    the side - probably to the left.
>  - Remove the top Wiki actions line ([Show Changes, Get Info, Subscribe]
>  - When the user isn't logged in, remove the bottom Wiki actions line
>    as well.
>  - Remove the MoinMoin/Python/HTML stuff at the bottom; sure, great
>    technology, but irrelevant to a visitor. 
>    (I'm happy to have http://pango.org/Colophon/...)
>  - Get rid of the little pictures by HTML links (should be a user pref
>    so we could swap the default, but the user pref doesn't seem to 
>    work for me)

OK, I went ahead and took a stab at doing this - the results can now
be seen at:

 http://wiki.pango.org/

(If you already have an account, you'll need to go to UserPreferences
and manually switch your theme to 'pango'). The theme is basically
a mash-together of the standard 'modern' and 'rightsidebar' themes,
decluttered as much as possible.

The page only has the "editbar" if you are logged in, so you may
want to try logging out to see what the effect is without it.

I think it might make sense to go even further and remove the search
entry - there just isn't enough content on the site to make search
that interesting, and I'm not sure that will ever change.
(The search isn't going to work for the "Manual" section which is the 
most interesting section to search.) But the search entry does make
the top of the page look more balanced.

The page width should probably also be limited; it wraps at about 130 
columns on my screen, which is too wide. It would be better to just have 
white space at the right side of the page.

I'm pretty happy with the results -- with the small amount of
content I have added, its pretty close to the point of being better
than the current www.pango.org (which says more about the current 
www.pango.org really.) The theme is certainly bland, but mostly
harmless.

Going forward

 - It would be cool if people wanted to fill out the Script Gallery
   section some more.

 - Feel free to add any content that seems appropriate to the site;
   a section of links to other similar systems, pages about your
   plans to improve Pango, etc. If you want stuff added to the
   standard set of navigation links, let me know. (Modifying that
   requires editing wikiconfig.py, so can't be done through the
   web interface.)

 - If someone (Tom, say) wants to take over theme maintenance, I'd
   be happy to give them the files as I have them now, and/or get
   them an account on www.gnome.org where they could update the
   theme directly.

Barring any major feedback, I'll probably switch www.pango.org
over some time next week.

Regards,
						Owen