Re: Making websites for gnome-apps sexier

[Luis Villa <luis villa gmail com>]

On 6/10/05, Andreas Nilsson <nisses mail home se> wrote:
> I dare to claim that the websites for various gnome-apps needs to get
> sexier.

Yeah, the average site could stand to be nicer :) It would be nice if
there were a
gnome.org/projects/sample/ or something that included standard links
like where to get it, hacking tips, so on, so forth, that people could
copy/paste to do their own site from.

[Oh, and a sexier http://gnome.org/projects/ would be a nice one-time
fix for someone too!]

> Right now it's a bit hard to find information on how to start hacking on
> your favorite gnome-app. This might lead to people intersted in
> contributing to a project, don't have a clue where to look. Some
> projects have websites on www.gnome.org/projects/, some of them are nice
> (the evolution site is fantastic), but some are really unmaintained and
> are in desperate need of updates (like the nautilus website and the one
> for g-conf).

To a certain extent, we do want to centralize that information, since
there is so much that would be repeated, and because we want to
publicize hacking on many things, even things that don't really
need/deserve a website (like gnome-session, for example.)

> The other day I came across the new gedit website
> (www.gnome.org/projects/gedit) and it was really nice.

Yeah, it is. Other nice ones include:
http://www.gnome.org/projects/sabayon/
http://www.gnome.org/projects/epiphany/
http://www.gnome.org/projects/evolution/

Note that only one of those follows the gnome template; that's not
necessarily a bug, but it would be good long-term to figure out why
that is, and what changes they make should be incorporated into a
gnome project 'demo' web site.

> It included how to get the software both via ftp and via CVS for those
> interested in hacking. It also included some nice screenshots and a
> short description of the software.
> 
> I also discovered that it was really easy to alter the gedit-site to
> make it fit for other projects and gave the nautilus website a try...se
> here for my results: http://ramnet.se/~nisse/diverse/nautilus.

Cool! Screenshot, maybe? :)

> Hopefully
> it will be up on the main site in a couple of days.

Do you need help getting it committed?

> So, in order to make it easier for new contributors, I suggest that a
> lookover of the sites in www.gnome.org/projects and that sites that not
> look that good gets this small facelift.

I'd definitely suggest focusing on a template, Andreas- that's often a
good way to get other people to do the work, by showing them how to do
it. Once you've written that up, people will naturally copy/paste it
and use it themselves.

Luis (who volunteers to be the first user of a template for
gnome.org/projects/livecd/)