habariproject.org goals
Owen Winkler
people will encounter when entering the world of Habari. While there is
a reasonable calling to produce a good-looking page so that first-time
visitors are attracted, I think we spend far too much time opining on
its look without having discussed the site's goals.
Overall, I think the goal of the site should be to inform people of the
goals of our project, engage them with Habari, and provide them the
tools needed to use Habari effectively.
Here are my thoughts as to what we need to provide on our site to
accomplish this:
* Marketing - We must adequately convey both the purpose and scope of
the software, and the extent of the community's interaction with it.
* Download - We must make the software available.
* Outreach - We must inform visitors of our desire to include them in
our community and provide instructions that best help them involve
themselves.
* Support - We must provide direct access to support that will not
encumber novice users.
* Documentation - We must provide the latest organized online documentation.
* News - We must publish evidence of the community's continued efforts
to produce a product and maintain it.
* Resources - We must provide access to community-created resources such
as plugins and themes.
There are miscellaneous issues that also should be addressed on the
site. For example, "habari" and "blog" are two terms that when used
together you would think would return the habariproject.org site as a
top result, but they do not. This is a result of ineffective or
unapplied SEO on the site. This needs to be corrected.
It would be nice to unify the look of the wiki and Trac with what we
have on the rest of the site.
We should produce screencasts demonstrating the base Habari features,
and provide screenshots of the software in use. I think it would be
nice to also include non-screencast video of people talking about Habari
and the community to illuminate the community behind the project. It we
could collect some of that video at some of the events we're planning to
be at, that would be useful.
We need to make a start at contributor-generated content. I would like
to have user profiles in place that interact with the bot in the IRC
channel, so that you could more easily match nick to user to email to
website.
The profiles could include the badge concept I had been talking about,
where users who interact with the community are awarded badges for the
aspect in which they participate. For example, contribute on X number
of wiki pages, get a badge. Some badges might be more subjective and
awarded only by peers. We could have a lot of fun with this feature I
think, and it could give people who are not yet on the PMC a sense of
achievement in the community.
We should bring back the discussion on the support forum. I don't want
to kill the mailing list, but we also need to be where the users can
most easily get to. Directing users to another site to use another
service doesn't seem the most direct and friendly way to offer support.
We should do our best to expand this, perhaps only now by making way
for the feature in the future.
Most significantly, contributor-generated content is going to include
the plugin and theme sections. There has been a lot of talk about this
in another thread:
http://groups.google.com/group/habari-dev/browse_thread/thread/e000299f72c0359c#
I'll reiterate what I had in mind for the plugin and theme directories.
A set of plugins would enable all of the following functionality on
the habariproject.org site:
Users will create accounts on hp.o with limit permissions based on ACL.
These accounts will be tied to the svn system on the habari-extras repo.
A new content-type in the Habari installation on hp.o will house plugin
description data. These posts will include the plugin name and
description, and serve as the assignment of maintainer of any particular
plugin. The post data would be linked into the beacon so that the
latest version of the plugin could be announced via our beacon service.
The plugin submitter has the option to use the extras repo or an
external location as the publication point for the plugin.
If the submitter uses the extras repo as the publication point, then the
Habari instance on hp.o will generate all required distribution files
for that plugin based on rules that we will publish. These "rules" will
include a way to have separate versions of a plugin for in-development,
and stable for any numbered version of Habari, probably via committable
branches.
The repo would be organized in such a way that stable plugins could
continue in development for the 1.0 version of Habari while a parallel
version is in development for the 2.0 version of Habari. Both would
produce stable releases for their respective Habari versions.
If the submitter users an external source as the publication point, then
they will be required to provide at least two URLs: One to the page
where the download is hosted, another to each actual distribution file
(the zip or tar file) that will be offered for download. The download
page must contain the other URLs provided. Direct access from the
habariproject.org server to the download files must exist for the plugin
to be listed.
The direct download URLs will not be listed on the hp.o site, but a
periodic hash of that file will be computed and published in the
plugin's listing (as with any plugin published on the hp.o site), which
will allow users to verify that the plugin they're downloading is the
same one to which the hp.o site refers, and that any comments made on
that plugin are about that specific downloaded file.
It's important to note here that I think the Habari project should not
endorse any plugins, whether in the -extras repo or not. There should
be no certification service; there should be no "Certified by Habari"
seal. Instead, we should figure out a way for visitors/site-members to
vouch for the plugins.
This could be a simple voting or thumbs-up/down system. Users should
receive some kind of a "reward" for participating in this system, and
user success could contribute to vote weight and ultimately plugin
rating. So a user who gives thumbs-ups to plugins that many other users
do will garner more weight for his thumbs-ups than those who thumbs-up
plugins that everyone else rates poorly.
I think it would be useful to single out users who rate plugins
successfully as the people to follow for recommendations in the
community, and perhaps list the plugins that they have rated or
commented on as part of their public profile.
The theme directory of the site should be similarly oriented, although
the ratings should include two options: Aesthetics and Functionality.
I think it's important to differentiate "I like the look of it" from "It
works well", since there would otherwise not be a way for a user to
determine whether to use a theme that nobody else likes the look of.
The weighted ratings system will factor well into this, since the votes
of users that do not distinguish functionality from aesthetics will be
counted less, based on comparison to users that do vote that way.
I think that it should also be possible to include basic statistics for
plugins and themes, specifically how many people clicked the download
link. We should offer this data via some API so that it can also be
published on the page hosting external plugins.
Regarding the restrictions on including plugins and themes in the hp.o
repo, I think we should limit accepted plugins to ASL2, but the author
may retain attribution in the info of the plugin. Likewise with themes,
we should limit accepted themes to those with a compatible license. In
the case that a CC license is selected, the stipulation of where the
attribution must appear must be ONLY in the theme.xml file. Licenses
that do not allow modification of the source or require display of
specific links should be rejected. If a theme is submitted with
affiliate-style links, then it should be possible and encouraged for
other users with -extras commit capabilities to alter that theme to be
less commercial. As such, we should discourage users from submitting
themes with those types of features.
What would be nice is if we had people willing to step forward and take
the reigns on whichever pieces of the system interested them so that we
can accomplish all of this before the end of June. If we can focus on
these things, which require some revisions to Habari's core, we'll be in
a better place to release 0.5 as an application fully-backed with a
working resource site.
Owen
Scott Merrill
there's a lot in here, and we'll be more successful at working toward
resolution if we narrow the focus into separate projects / initiatives
/ what-have-you.
On Mon, Apr 14, 2008 at 11:25 AM, Owen Winkler <epi...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Overall, I think the goal of the site should be to inform people of the
> goals of our project, engage them with Habari, and provide them the
> tools needed to use Habari effectively.
Sounds reasonable. Do we have these goals succinctly documented
anywhere yet in order to make it easy to incorporate these goals into
the site design?
> * Marketing - We must adequately convey both the purpose and scope of
> the software, and the extent of the community's interaction with it.
This has been the primary focus of previous hp.o redesign discussions.
I think it's important not to throw the baby out with the bathwater:
let's keep those other discussions alive, and continue to work in
what's appropriate from your list below.
> * Download - We must make the software available.
Easy enough.
> * Outreach - We must inform visitors of our desire to include them in
> our community and provide instructions that best help them involve
> themselves.
Should we crib from WordPress and Ubuntu with their "ideas" submission
/ voting mechanisms? Both seem like pretty popular avenues for casual
participation.
> * Support - We must provide direct access to support that will not
> encumber novice users.
Easy enough. See also below, re: forums.
> * Documentation - We must provide the latest organized online documentation.
Easy enough.
> * News - We must publish evidence of the community's continued efforts
> to produce a product and maintain it.
This, I think, will likely be one of the biggest challenges. I think
Sean had been doing a good job with the "Flashback" posts; but I'd
like to see more voices posting more often to the main blog. Perhaps
a small committee can be formed to distill interesting posts to the
mailing lists into blog posts?
> There are miscellaneous issues that also should be addressed on the
> site. For example, "habari" and "blog" are two terms that when used
> together you would think would return the habariproject.org site as a
> top result, but they do not. This is a result of ineffective or
> unapplied SEO on the site. This needs to be corrected.
Searching for "Habari" gives us the hp.o as the first Google result.
Your example provides "habariblog.com", a domain I think we could
politely ask to redirect to hp.o.
> It would be nice to unify the look of the wiki and Trac with what we
> have on the rest of the site.
This isn't a big deal to me. If someone sufficiently talented would
like to apply their skills to the CSS necessary to accomplish it,
great. Otherwise, let's focus on the more important bits.
> We should produce screencasts demonstrating the base Habari features,
> and provide screenshots of the software in use.
I agree. I've produced audio for three, and video for two. These are
substantially more difficult than I expected, so care needs to be
given to deciding what features to highlight, and in what depth.
> I think it would be
> nice to also include non-screencast video of people talking about Habari
> and the community to illuminate the community behind the project. It we
> could collect some of that video at some of the events we're planning to
> be at, that would be useful.
Something like this, perhaps? http://wtfistwitter.com/ :)
> We need to make a start at contributor-generated content.
An idea that occurred to me is to permit visitors to the hp.o site pen
a short testimonial, and provide their name and link to their site.
After reviewing the submissions for appropriateness, we could add them
to a queue of random user quotes about Habari that get displayed on
our home page. Perhaps include screenshots of said Habari-powered
sites, when available, in place of the static image of Chris' site.
> The profiles could include the badge concept I had been talking about,
> where users who interact with the community are awarded badges for the
> aspect in which they participate. For example, contribute on X number
> of wiki pages, get a badge. Some badges might be more subjective and
> awarded only by peers. We could have a lot of fun with this feature I
> think, and it could give people who are not yet on the PMC a sense of
> achievement in the community.
This would be a pretty hefty plugin, I should think. It would need to
be planned out pretty carefully to make sure it sufficiently supports
future involvement with the community for which we might not currently
be able to anticipate. It would be extremely nice if we release this
plugin so that other communities can use it for their own web sites.
> We should bring back the discussion on the support forum. I don't want
> to kill the mailing list, but we also need to be where the users can
> most easily get to. Directing users to another site to use another
> service doesn't seem the most direct and friendly way to offer support.
> We should do our best to expand this, perhaps only now by making way
> for the feature in the future.
I think we need a forum in place before the 0.5 release, with some
body of activity recorded therein. I'm not keen on forums in general,
but if we use one I am strongly of the opinion that we should use a
tried-and-true system that provides good search and an easy means to
organize content by subject matter.
Ubuntu's forums seem to be doing very well with vBulletin. I'm
familiar with phpBB, too. Both provide the kind of features and
organization I think is important in a forum solution.
Cheers,
Scott
Ali B.
<snip of a "bouquet" of some really great ideas :) >
FWIW, I am in for all of this, nothing I strongly disagree with really.
I just wanted to add that giving the little time frame we are looking at (2 months) we really need to consider prioritizing what we plan for. That way, if we miss a couple of features, we would still have a working system rather than having stuff nearly implemented but with no base to exist on.
Just my USD0.02 :)
--
Ali B / dmondark
http://www.awhitebox.com
Graham Christensen
Graham Christensen
http://itrebal.com - Customized Web Hosting
Graham.Ch...@iamgraham.net
Michael C. Harris
>
> On Mon, Apr 14, 2008 at 11:25 AM, Owen Winkler <epi...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > * Support - We must provide direct access to support that will not
> > encumber novice users.
An IRC widget connected to #habari on hp.o? The Live Help plugin could
be extended to provide end user facing IRC.
> > * News - We must publish evidence of the community's continued efforts
> > to produce a product and maintain it.
>
> This, I think, will likely be one of the biggest challenges. I think
> Sean had been doing a good job with the "Flashback" posts; but I'd
> like to see more voices posting more often to the main blog. Perhaps
> a small committee can be formed to distill interesting posts to the
> mailing lists into blog posts?
Which would give us a good opportunity to test and develop
multi-author blogs (there's already one bug open #253), so we can lure
some big property blogs to Habari.
> > We should produce screencasts demonstrating the base Habari features,
> > and provide screenshots of the software in use.
>
> I agree. I've produced audio for three, and video for two. These are
> substantially more difficult than I expected, so care needs to be
> given to deciding what features to highlight, and in what depth.
Where are these? I was away when they were being discussed.
> I think we need a forum in place before the 0.5 release, with some
> body of activity recorded therein. I'm not keen on forums in general,
> but if we use one I am strongly of the opinion that we should use a
> tried-and-true system that provides good search and an easy means to
> organize content by subject matter.
Not a discussion content type plugin for Habari? ;)
--
Michael C. Harris, School of CS&IT, RMIT University
http://twofishcreative.com/michael/blog
Michael C. Harris
[snip]
> I'll reiterate what I had in mind for the plugin and theme directories.
> A set of plugins would enable all of the following functionality on
> the habariproject.org site:
>
> Users will create accounts on hp.o with limit permissions based on ACL.
I still have my hand up for continuing to be involved in ACL. The last
comment that I've seen on that was from you, Owen
(http://groups.google.com/group/habari-dev/msg/b5527524106206a7). Have
you had time to percolate?
I'm also interested in plugin and theme content type plugins and have
been thinking about how it would work for a while now, pretty much all
of which has been covered in your comments.
> What would be nice is if we had people willing to step forward and take
> the reigns on whichever pieces of the system interested them so that we
> can accomplish all of this before the end of June. If we can focus on
> these things, which require some revisions to Habari's core, we'll be in
> a better place to release 0.5 as an application fully-backed with a
> working resource site.
Unfortunately, I don't really have the time at the moment to "take the
reins" on much, but I'm really happy to provide support (including
"code this up like this.")
Scott Merrill
<michael...@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Mon, Apr 14, 2008 at 03:29:50PM -0400, Scott Merrill wrote:
> > > We should produce screencasts demonstrating the base Habari features,
> > > and provide screenshots of the software in use.
> >
> > I agree. I've produced audio for three, and video for two. These are
> > substantially more difficult than I expected, so care needs to be
> > given to deciding what features to highlight, and in what depth.
>
> Where are these? I was away when they were being discussed.
http://skippy.net/files/install1.mp3
http://skippy.net/files/content1.mp3
http://skippy.net/files/media1.mp3
Replace ".mp3" with ".txt" to access the scripts I wrote for each.
> > I think we need a forum in place before the 0.5 release, with some
> > body of activity recorded therein. I'm not keen on forums in general,
> > but if we use one I am strongly of the opinion that we should use a
> > tried-and-true system that provides good search and an easy means to
> > organize content by subject matter.
>
> Not a discussion content type plugin for Habari? ;)
I think we need to focus on our core competency, which is currently
blogging. It wouldn't be terribly difficult to make a Habari theme
and supporting plugins to provide forum-like functionality, but as
others have pointed out we're already biting an awful lot for two
months. :)
Cheers,
Scott
Andrew da Silva
want:
http://skitch.com/freakerz/jq79/fullscreen
Only part missing would be the user interaction part.
And if you say it looks like OhLoh, well, it wasn't based on them, and
it needs graphics to complete the look I was going for.
On Apr 15, 9:28 am, "Scott Merrill" <ski...@skippy.net> wrote:
> On Mon, Apr 14, 2008 at 9:36 PM, Michael C. Harris
>
> > On Mon, Apr 14, 2008 at 03:29:50PM -0400, Scott Merrill wrote:
> > > > We should produce screencasts demonstrating the base Habari features,
> > > > and provide screenshots of the software in use.
>
> > > I agree. I've produced audio for three, and video for two. These are
> > > substantially more difficult than I expected, so care needs to be
> > > given to deciding what features to highlight, and in what depth.
>
> > Where are these? I was away when they were being discussed.
>
Michael C. Harris
>
> On Mon, Apr 14, 2008 at 9:36 PM, Michael C. Harris
> <michael...@gmail.com> wrote:
> > On Mon, Apr 14, 2008 at 03:29:50PM -0400, Scott Merrill wrote:
> > > > We should produce screencasts demonstrating the base Habari features,
> > > > and provide screenshots of the software in use.
> > >
> > > I agree. I've produced audio for three, and video for two. These are
> > > substantially more difficult than I expected, so care needs to be
> > > given to deciding what features to highlight, and in what depth.
> >
> > Where are these? I was away when they were being discussed.
>
> http://skippy.net/files/install1.mp3
> http://skippy.net/files/content1.mp3
> http://skippy.net/files/media1.mp3
>
> Replace ".mp3" with ".txt" to access the scripts I wrote for each.
And the two videos?
> > > I think we need a forum in place before the 0.5 release, with some
> > > body of activity recorded therein. I'm not keen on forums in general,
> > > but if we use one I am strongly of the opinion that we should use a
> > > tried-and-true system that provides good search and an easy means to
> > > organize content by subject matter.
> >
> > Not a discussion content type plugin for Habari? ;)
>
> I think we need to focus on our core competency, which is currently
> blogging. It wouldn't be terribly difficult to make a Habari theme
> and supporting plugins to provide forum-like functionality, but as
> others have pointed out we're already biting an awful lot for two
> months. :)
It's okay, it was a joke :)
Owen Winkler
>
> And the two videos?
I did one with Skippy's voiceover:
Owen
Michael C. Harris
That looks great. Can we put it on hp.o in place of "Screencast coming
soon"?
Andrew da Silva
The layout I posted (http://andrewdasilva.com/incubator/
habariproject.png) is working html/css (thanks to chrisj).
If the community doesn't want to use it, please say so rather than not
replying, this way I can use the layout for something else.
Thanks!
On Apr 15, 8:19 pm, "Michael C. Harris" <michael.twof...@gmail.com>
wrote:
Caius Durling
On Apr 14, 8:29 pm, "Scott Merrill" <ski...@skippy.net> wrote:
> > There are miscellaneous issues that also should be addressed on the
> > site. For example, "habari" and "blog" are two terms that when used
> > together you would think would return the habariproject.org site as a
> > top result, but they do not. This is a result of ineffective or
> > unapplied SEO on the site. This needs to be corrected.
>
> Searching for "Habari" gives us the hp.o as the first Google result.
> Your example provides "habariblog.com", a domain I think we could
> politely ask to redirect to hp.o.
experiences with habari, but seeing as I've done one post in the last
6 months I'm not too fussed if its better to just 301 it to hp.o.
C
Michael C. Harris
>
> Where are we with this project?
>
> The layout I posted (http://andrewdasilva.com/incubator/
> habariproject.png) is working html/css (thanks to chrisj).
>
> If the community doesn't want to use it, please say so rather than not
> replying, this way I can use the layout for something else.
You're design looks good, but personally, I'm more concerned with
hp.o's functionality than its design. And I'm not a designer's elbow,
so I'll leave the question to others.
Silkjaer
(colors are easy to change, I had a bad color day).
The sketch isn't thought of as a final front page mockup, but more as
a basic design, that should be fitted onto whatever the functionality
and structure hb.o ends up with.
As another comment, I really think the logo itself should be
rethinked :|
/Thomas
On May 26, 1:11 am, "Michael C. Harris" <michael.twof...@gmail.com>
wrote:
Randy Walker
~Randy
Scott Merrill
>
> I have done a little sketching as well: http://blog.theundersigned.net/hbo_sketch_4.jpg
> (colors are easy to change, I had a bad color day).
>
> The sketch isn't thought of as a final front page mockup, but more as
> a basic design, that should be fitted onto whatever the functionality
> and structure hb.o ends up with.
A thought occurs to me: how feasible would it be to use some of the
features of Habari's administration to present data about Habari?
Like, could we use a loupe on the home page, so folks can drag it
across a list of features, or screenshots, or what have you? Can we
have some buttons that perform the live search function to present our
information, and fill in the search box? This would let people see
AND use Habari while learning about it.
> As another comment, I really think the logo itself should be
> rethinked :|
I like the logo! :)
Michael Heilemann
--
Michael Heilemann
http://binarybonsai.com
Scott Merrill
> I've said it before, and I'll say it again; the logo is bad.
Opinions are like .... something. :) There are lots of things for
which I dislike the logo. That dislike does not necessarily prevent
me from using the thing.
If the logo is what people complain about the most, I'd say we're
doing pretty well with our vision and implementation!
Cheers,
Scott
Christian Mohn
do all of this things all at once? Seems like there are lots of ideas on
reorganizing, discussing licensing, wiki, docs, released, branches etc. Are
we that big that we need to do all of these things all at once? I fear we
are spreading ourselves way to thin here.
Christian
Michael C. Harris
>
> One thing occurred to me just now, reading this. Are we really "staffed" to
> do all of this things all at once? Seems like there are lots of ideas on
> reorganizing, discussing licensing, wiki, docs, released, branches etc. Are
> we that big that we need to do all of these things all at once? I fear we
> are spreading ourselves way to thin here.
I think the priority is getting 0.5 released before the podcamp, and
some of these discussions (and actions resulting from them) need to
happen before 0.5.
Identifying other things that need to happen is also important.
People have the ability and desire to contribute in different ways,
and that means that some of those other things might happen in
parallel to our main current target. These non-code things are often
where people new to the project can start out contributing. We should
just embrace that.
Discussions arise as people see the need to raise issues. If
licensing, hp.o, the wiki etc are raised now, it's because someone
sees them as important now.
Christian Mohn
at a time, resulting in that nothing gets done.
> -----Original Message-----
> From: habar...@googlegroups.com [mailto:habar...@googlegroups.com]
> On Behalf Of Michael C. Harris
> Sent: 29. mai 2008 02:19
> To: habar...@googlegroups.com
> Subject: [habari-dev] Re: habariproject.org goals
>
>
Michael C. Harris
>
> Of course we should embrace it, I'm just worried that we are doing too much
> at a time, resulting in that nothing gets done.
My short point is, you can't stop people doing stuff they want to do :)