On Thu, May 8, 2008 at 12:49 PM, Victor Denisov <vdenisov@???> wrote:
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> | consider a migration seriously. If it was up to me, we would use Trac
> | and only Trac (for the website, wikki and bug-tracker).
>
> A quick vote of confidence for Trac. It's a *very* good piece of
> software, and its Wiki<->Tickets<->SVN integration is amazing. We've
> used it for three major projects now and had nothing but *very* positive
> experience.
Trac isn't a bad bugtracker, probably better than Mantis, although has
some conspicuous limitations, such as no dependencies between bugs.
That being said, I don't think Trac is designed to be a CMS, and
frankly I don't think its appearance is enticing as a "user facing"
website, its even worse than the current Freenet website. If we did
use it, it would require some major re-theming.
I think we should look to commercial and well-funded open source
projects for inspiration about how to make our website enticing for
first-time visitors, while still providing the depth of information we
need to convey.
http://getfirefox.com/ is good because its colorful, inviting, and the
"call to action" is very clear, you don't have to spend much time
looking for that download link! Now, its tone may be a little too
in-your-face for Freenet, but there are things we can learn from it.
I'm a big fan of David Watanabe's work, both the software he writes,
and the websites he designs for them. I'd recommend looking at:
http://xtorrent.com/
http://www.inquisitorx.com/safari/
http://www.acquisitionx.com/
You could argue that all of those things have it easy, because most
people understand what those things do, they don't need an elaborate
explanation. But look at Gnome's website:
http://www.gnome.org/
It is clean, simple, yet if you need to you can quickly dig down to a
vast wealth of information.
Either way, since we are Java hackers for the most part, not web
designers, I strongly recommend that we borrow as much as we can from
elsewhere, even so far as using free or creative commons HTML and CSS
verbatim, perhaps with only a few minor changes.
Ian.
--
Email: ian@???
Cell: +1 512 422 3588
Skype: sanity
