I personally like the services that Apple provides for us via macosforge; with this installation we do have someone who is updating our software and caring about our server. Therefore I'd rather prefer to try to modify the macosforge provided framework to meet our needs, at least as far as this is possible. We can still add a ports page and a documentation subdirectory and keep the wordpress installation etc. regards, -Markus On 28.08.2007, at 03:12, Juan Manuel Palacios wrote:

Good evening everyone!

I am most glad to announce that thanks to the work I've been putting into the PortIndex2MySQL.tcl script lately, I was able to recover our old web site back from the dead as a natural progression to the former, as you may have seen from my recent commit r28303. The result is posted at my web server, http:// apollo.homeunix.net/macports, reflecting the state of the current trunk/www dir in svn at any moment.

Nevertheless, what you'll see there is no more than the bringing up to speed of the old content with current information, but it is otherwise the same site we used to have back in OpenDarwin days (the "not yet" part of this message's title, unfortunately). While at it I also restructured the sources a bit, moving files here and there to have a cleaner layout, only editing the English pages and moving all other languages into a 'localized' dir, though.

The really important part, however, is the revival of the ports.php page, which many users have been craving for ever since we moved to Mac OS Forge. I'm feeding this page with live information off our ports tree by running the PortIndex2MySQL.tcl script locally, though not automated yet (so lag is to be expected).

Surely many things will seem broken (links maybe --surely for any language other than English--) and/or outdated, certainly including the now aging visual & structural design. Kevin Van Vechten assured me we could host the ports.php page and new guide on Mac OS Forge servers, but I'm more than sure that only from looking at the site it'll be quite obvious that we need a new and revamped design, short of a complete overhaul.

In a nutshell, the purpose of this message is to call for a discussion on what we should do with our web site, which is in desperate need of some love, blood and new air. I'm even thinking about calling for an open contest so that anyone can submit new designs and logos for the project to adapt, extending the invitation to our entire user base: users mailing list, irc channel, wordpress post, wiki page, maybe even inviting WebKit people --who naturally have a thing for designing beautiful websites-- and who knows what else... something akin to NetBSD's logo redesign contest some years ago. Even though the rules for such contest would have to be very clearly defined and the entire process might be somewhat involved, I have to admit I'm developing quite a strong inclination for this approach; if anything, it'll surely help spice up interest and involvement with the project from our user base.

So to sum up, it would be great to define a roadmap for a revamped web presence before devoting any more energy to what we currently have. Please don't be shy to post your opinions so that we can all start working toward finding the resources we need to make this happen. I am more than happy to lead this effort both in planning and coordination, but one mandatory requirement before moving forward is knowing if I'll have anything to lead ;-)

Regards,...

-jmpp

_______________________________________________ macports-dev mailing list macports-dev@lists.macosforge.org http://lists.macosforge.org/mailman/listinfo/macports-dev

--- Markus W. Weissmann http://www.mweissmann.de/

Le 07-08-28 à 15:46, Chris Pickel a écrit :

On 27 Aug, 2007, at 21:12, Juan Manuel Palacios wrote:

...

I am most glad to announce that thanks to the work I've been putting into the PortIndex2MySQL.tcl script lately, I was able to recover our old web site back from the dead as a natural progression to the former, as you may have seen from my recent commit r28303. The result is posted at my web server, http:// apollo.homeunix.net/macports, reflecting the state of the current trunk/www dir in svn at any moment.

This inspired me to have a go at a set of new styles last night, which I've posted to http://stwing.org/~chpickel/macports/ -- pretty much a verbatim conversion of jmpp's page for now, with a few added links.

(I'm still not sure about the languages. They're no good to be linked from the bottom of the page, but maybe they're too prominent in mine. Also, does anyone actually recognize the English flag?)

But anyway, there's a thought about how the site should look. Not much of a departure from the Mac OS Forge look, but still more distinctively MacPorts.

I love it yves

On 29 Aug, 2007, at 3:00, Michael Wild wrote:

Chris Pickel wrote:

...

This inspired me to have a go at a set of new styles last night, which I've posted to http://stwing.org/~chpickel/macports/ -- pretty much a verbatim conversion of jmpp's page for now, with a few added links. (I'm still not sure about the languages. They're no good to be linked from the bottom of the page, but maybe they're too prominent in mine. Also, does anyone actually recognize the English flag?) But anyway, there's a thought about how the site should look. Not much of a departure from the Mac OS Forge look, but still more distinctively MacPorts. Chris

Lovely

A few things i didn't like that much:

- The background of the page title should probably also have rounded corners.

This can be done, but would require a fair amount of extra work to go into the HTML code--i.e. instead of "<h2>Header</h2>" it would be "<div class='header'> <div> <div> <h2>Header<h2> </div> </div> </ div>". Maybe this can be revisited later.

- If I use Firefox, the navigation menu has a white stripe across it (where the rounded-corner image and the box meet). Furthermore, the colours do not seem to match in Firefox. These things are fine in Safari.

I love the language-fly-out. Really cool. And yes, the British flag is definitely recognisable (British spelling ;-)).

I've actually worked on the page a bit since I originally posted to the list (the fly-out was my fix for my earlier thought that the languages were too prominent). And the American/British flag is new; it was previously the English [1] (not British) flag. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flag_of_England The white stripe is a regression from earlier, and I'm not sure just what's causing it--it exists in Opera too. The color thing is a more general bug and I'm never sure what to do about it. Chris

Chris Pickel wrote:

On 29 Aug, 2007, at 3:00, Michael Wild wrote:

...

Chris Pickel wrote:

...

This inspired me to have a go at a set of new styles last night, which I've posted to http://stwing.org/~chpickel/macports/ -- pretty much a verbatim conversion of jmpp's page for now, with a few added links. (I'm still not sure about the languages. They're no good to be linked from the bottom of the page, but maybe they're too prominent in mine. Also, does anyone actually recognize the English flag?) But anyway, there's a thought about how the site should look. Not much of a departure from the Mac OS Forge look, but still more distinctively MacPorts. Chris

Lovely

A few things i didn't like that much:

- The background of the page title should probably also have rounded corners.

This can be done, but would require a fair amount of extra work to go into the HTML code--i.e. instead of "<h2>Header</h2>" it would be "<div class='header'> <div> <div> <h2>Header<h2> </div> </div> </div>". Maybe this can be revisited later.

...

- If I use Firefox, the navigation menu has a white stripe across it (where the rounded-corner image and the box meet). Furthermore, the colours do not seem to match in Firefox. These things are fine in Safari.

I love the language-fly-out. Really cool. And yes, the British flag is definitely recognisable (British spelling ;-)).

I've actually worked on the page a bit since I originally posted to the list (the fly-out was my fix for my earlier thought that the languages were too prominent). And the American/British flag is new; it was previously the English [1] (not British) flag.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flag_of_England

The white stripe is a regression from earlier, and I'm not sure just what's causing it--it exists in Opera too. The color thing is a more general bug and I'm never sure what to do about it.

Chris

Hi A simple #navigation { margin-top: -1px; } solves that problem for me and also looks fine in safari (and yes, it is a bit of a hack...) The colour issue seems to be a problem with the png-libraries, or similar. The colour you used in the css does not exactly match the one in the .png images, and Safari and Firefox seem to "round" them to a different colour. Using Seashore I just filled in the right colour (#B1BACC). Things look fine now in both browsers. I attached the changed images. Hope this helps Michael

Le 07-08-29 à 11:37, markd@macports.org a écrit :

Anders F Björklund <afb@macports.org> writes:

...

I like it a lot! It also gets away from Hexley, now that it's not doing Darwin...

So is Hexley's use deprecated for OS X? I still associated him with Darwin, even though OpenDarwin is no more. I still have him in some other documentation I have.

Maybe, but if it is more Mac than Darwin, then I still think you can't do Mac stuff seriously without a nice shiny stylish attractive aqua icon ... http://trac.macosforge.org/projects/macports/ticket/12337 yves

(DISCLAIMER after reading my message before hitting send: Hope it doesn't come off as confrontational, that's really not my intention! Rather, I want to be really sharp at pointing out our shortcomings so that we can do a better job at fixing them) On Aug 28, 2007, at 12:33 PM, Weissmann Markus wrote:

I personally like the services that Apple provides for us via macosforge; with this installation we do have someone who is updating our software and caring about our server. Therefore I'd rather prefer to try to modify the macosforge provided framework to meet our needs, at least as far as this is possible. We can still add a ports page and a documentation subdirectory and keep the wordpress installation etc.

regards,

-Markus

I'm not proposing we forego any of Mac OS Forge's services if we don't strictly have to, nor that we go back to our old website (certainly not that! --not because of its functionality, which was good, but because of its outdated look & feel--). All I had in mind when recovering trunk/www/ from the ashes is that people take a good look at those pages in their rendered form to better asses what we'll need and what we'll discard in a new design going forward. What I am indeed proposing is that we use the services we currently have at our disposal in a dramatically improved and more efficient manner. We now have on one end a wordpress front posing as a sorely lacking home page for the project; and on the other end, for the most part disjoint from the former, a considerably disorganized trac front that, OK, is good at its main purpose of tracking issue tickets and serving a source browser portal, but for the rest is really inconsistent with the overall project look and feel which we... eeeehhhhhhhhh, hhhhhmmmmmm, don't even have to begin with! Added to that, our current layout has no space for a guide section nor an "Available Ports" page providing dynamic listings our software offerings, something many many users have been craving for ever since we moved away from OpenDarwin. Those two areas of our old site now exist mostly as independent efforts (http://geeklair.net/ new_macports_guide/ & http://apollo.homeunix.net/macports/ports.php), so in my opinion they are even more than disjoint from the two fronts listed above. We clearly need to get our act together and correct the current situation by developing a unified site that does our web presence the justice the project deserves. Take a look, for example, at Adium's web page, www.adiumx.com, and focus on how their portal integrates rather seamlessly with a blog, trac services and other sections users might be interested in, both in functionality and in look & feel. No need to stress what a long way a clean design like that can go in making the whole web experience a valuable one... something not many have expressed about our current site, if anyone... With this initiative I'm stating that we need a whole new website, complete with redesigned functionality, new look & feel and, if resources allow, a new project logo (& mascot ;-). We are all aware that's quite a bit of an undertaking, I'm not day dreaming here, so lets try to put together a protocol of how we should go about finding the resources we'll need to make it all happen. Do we have something we can work our way up from? Is Chris' mockup not only an appealing one (it is to me), but also one that will scale up well? Do we already have any volunteers that want to start coding/designing something? Do we have to go out to our user base and ask people to join this task force? If so, how? What should the rules look like? Before answering any of those questions, I think it would be wise to asses what it is that we all want to see in a new web page, in order to be able to tell anyone donating his/her time/resources: "this, this and that is what we want to have". I'd now like to refocus this thread on exactly that, with my personal take following: -) Home: a front page detailing what the project is about (including a brief description of our ports tree), mission goals (very brief summary of a project roadmap) and introductory text of how to participate/join; -) Download & Installation: section describing exactly what its name says; -) Available Ports: old ports.php page with some extensions I'll explain below; -) Documentation: new guide with automated regen in place; -) Support & Development: link to our (revamped) trac portal. If you (any reader) have payed attention to trunk/www lately, you'll realize I'm pretty much in line with the old web page, which I do believe was good in functionality. Differing from it, though: -) first and foremost, of course, new look & feel and logo (and project mascot? ;-) that wraps *all* of our site; -) blog/news section, which can be provided by our existing wordpress front, but which I wouldn't be too sure on how to integrate with the rest of the site (separate tab? just below the introductory text in the home page? maybe someone more webdesign savvy can chime in); -) Help section can easily be eliminated if we revamp trac's welcoming page (take a look at trac.adiumx.com); -) love Chris' idea of a sidebar, which can have a "Shortcuts" section with direct links to areas we infer will be of special interest to users. Chris does this but calls it "Development", and I think that overlaps a tad too much with "Support & Development" as a main section; I'd just call it "Shortcuts" and make it as broad in scope as we like (shortcuts don't have to be developer oriented only ;-). Another good example of a sidebar can be found in Webkit's site (www.webkit.org), another page I love and that I think we should study to design ours; -) layout of "Available Ports" should be "re-thought" to allow room for a "Build Status" section that will be populated with html output from build log submissions, once we start our automated build runs (http://trac.macports.org/projects/macports/wiki/ PortLoggingProposal , which I/we will hopefully write before the sun becomes a white dwarf). What says y'all? Anything obvious I'm missing? Anything obnoxious about my ideas/proposal? I'd really love to get this show on the road ASAP, so it would be great to get at least some feedback to finally declare a "design freeze" that will allow us to set the design team that will hopefully form in a defined course. Regards to all and thanks for reading this far, as always ;-) -jmpp

Juan Manuel Palacios wrote:

...

Maybe, but if it is more Mac than Darwin, then I still think you can't do Mac stuff seriously without a nice shiny stylish attractive aqua icon ...

http://trac.macosforge.org/projects/macports/ticket/12337

yves

A project icon would indeed be great in my opinion, I'm on and off going about the need for a revamped project look & feel possibly together with a new project mascot, so this is something I'd definitely support. But with respect to this mockup specifically, I would think that overall we all want to move away from the Hexley theme. Any other ideas?

I don't think we need an application icon, before we have any application to go with it. Unless the web site really needs to have one, instead of the current Terminal.app icon ? Which brings us to the current state of the frontend / portmanager, that I don't know. But I'm sure that Pallet could use a new icon, as opposed to reusing Installer.app's... --anders

On Aug 30, 2007, at 11:32, Juan Manuel Palacios wrote:

(DISCLAIMER after reading my message before hitting send: Hope it doesn't come off as confrontational, that's really not my intention! Rather, I want to be really sharp at pointing out our shortcomings so that we can do a better job at fixing them)

On Aug 28, 2007, at 12:33 PM, Weissmann Markus wrote:

...

I personally like the services that Apple provides for us via macosforge; with this installation we do have someone who is updating our software and caring about our server. Therefore I'd rather prefer to try to modify the macosforge provided framework to meet our needs, at least as far as this is possible. We can still add a ports page and a documentation subdirectory and keep the wordpress installation etc.

I'm not proposing we forego any of Mac OS Forge's services if we don't strictly have to, nor that we go back to our old website (certainly not that! --not because of its functionality, which was good, but because of its outdated look & feel--). All I had in mind when recovering trunk/www/ from the ashes is that people take a good look at those pages in their rendered form to better asses what we'll need and what we'll discard in a new design going forward.

Mmm.... Better asses... (I think there's an "s" missing there.... :))

What I am indeed proposing is that we use the services we currently have at our disposal in a dramatically improved and more efficient manner. We now have on one end a wordpress front posing as a sorely lacking home page for the project; and on the other end, for the most part disjoint from the former, a considerably disorganized trac front that, OK, is good at its main purpose of tracking issue tickets and serving a source browser portal, but for the rest is really inconsistent with the overall project look and feel which we... eeeehhhhhhhhh, hhhhhmmmmmm, don't even have to begin with!

Added to that, our current layout has no space for a guide section nor an "Available Ports" page providing dynamic listings our software offerings, something many many users have been craving for ever since we moved away from OpenDarwin. Those two areas of our old site now exist mostly as independent efforts (http:// geeklair.net/new_macports_guide/ & http://apollo.homeunix.net/ macports/ports.php), so in my opinion they are even more than disjoint from the two fronts listed above.

We clearly need to get our act together and correct the current situation by developing a unified site that does our web presence the justice the project deserves. Take a look, for example, at Adium's web page, www.adiumx.com, and focus on how their portal integrates rather seamlessly with a blog, trac services and other sections users might be interested in, both in functionality and in look & feel. No need to stress what a long way a clean design like that can go in making the whole web experience a valuable one... something not many have expressed about our current site, if anyone...

With this initiative I'm stating that we need a whole new website, complete with redesigned functionality, new look & feel and, if resources allow, a new project logo (& mascot ;-). We are all aware that's quite a bit of an undertaking, I'm not day dreaming here, so lets try to put together a protocol of how we should go about finding the resources we'll need to make it all happen. Do we have something we can work our way up from? Is Chris' mockup not only an appealing one (it is to me), but also one that will scale up well? Do we already have any volunteers that want to start coding/ designing something? Do we have to go out to our user base and ask people to join this task force? If so, how? What should the rules look like?

Before answering any of those questions, I think it would be wise to asses what it is that we all want to see in a new web page, in order to be able to tell anyone donating his/her time/resources: "this, this and that is what we want to have". I'd now like to refocus this thread on exactly that, with my personal take following:

-) Home: a front page detailing what the project is about (including a brief description of our ports tree), mission goals (very brief summary of a project roadmap) and introductory text of how to participate/join; -) Download & Installation: section describing exactly what its name says; -) Available Ports: old ports.php page with some extensions I'll explain below; -) Documentation: new guide with automated regen in place; -) Support & Development: link to our (revamped) trac portal.

If you (any reader) have payed attention to trunk/www lately, you'll realize I'm pretty much in line with the old web page, which I do believe was good in functionality. Differing from it, though:

-) first and foremost, of course, new look & feel and logo (and project mascot? ;-) that wraps *all* of our site; -) blog/news section, which can be provided by our existing wordpress front, but which I wouldn't be too sure on how to integrate with the rest of the site (separate tab? just below the introductory text in the home page? maybe someone more webdesign savvy can chime in); -) Help section can easily be eliminated if we revamp trac's welcoming page (take a look at trac.adiumx.com); -) love Chris' idea of a sidebar, which can have a "Shortcuts" section with direct links to areas we infer will be of special interest to users. Chris does this but calls it "Development", and I think that overlaps a tad too much with "Support & Development" as a main section; I'd just call it "Shortcuts" and make it as broad in scope as we like (shortcuts don't have to be developer oriented only ;-). Another good example of a sidebar can be found in Webkit's site (www.webkit.org), another page I love and that I think we should study to design ours; -) layout of "Available Ports" should be "re-thought" to allow room for a "Build Status" section that will be populated with html output from build log submissions, once we start our automated build runs (http://trac.macports.org/projects/macports/wiki/ PortLoggingProposal , which I/we will hopefully write before the sun becomes a white dwarf).

What says y'all? Anything obvious I'm missing? Anything obnoxious about my ideas/proposal? I'd really love to get this show on the road ASAP, so it would be great to get at least some feedback to finally declare a "design freeze" that will allow us to set the design team that will hopefully form in a defined course.

Regards to all and thanks for reading this far, as always ;-)

Just wanted to quickly say "yes" to pretty much everything you wrote. Also, in May, I started working on a new MacPorts web site design, but never posted it. I'll dust it off and post what I have, and people can see what they think.

On Sep 1, 2007, at 5:09 PM, Ryan Schmidt wrote:

I'm in favor of getting rid of Hexley. Never liked him. The goal of MacPorts should be to eventually appeal to any Mac user, and I don't feel that the image of a thing with devil horns and a pitchfork, no matter how cute or how lovingly rendered in Aqua style, is appropriate. :-/

I like Hexley, but don't want to use him moving forward simply because he represents OpenDarwin, which is precisely the past we want to move away from. And on the subject of an icon, I wasn't referring to something that would be seen on, say, Portfiles from the Finder; that doesn't make any sense for us at least for the time being (which will maybe change once we have an Aqua GUI). I was instead referring to a renewed project logo and/or mascot, something we can display on our new website and elsewhere. In any case, the two don't have to be tied together (website redesign & new log). We can always deal with content & website functionality in an orthogonal manner from logo/mascot redesign, which we can always place on top of already working pages later on... and for which we could indeed have an open redesign contest! Any design mockups already? ;-) Regards,... -jmpp