ideas for restructuring Community site home page content

[Paul Orwig]

After implementing the UI changes for the Community site, Airton and I would like to restructure the Community site home page content The primary goal for this step would be to make it easier for our users to find the content they are interested in, and to highlight what the different sections of the Commuity site consist of.

 

Below are some ideas Airton and I have come up with along with ideas we have received (thanks Elin!). Please let us know if you have ideas on what content should appear on a restructured Community site home page!

• Make it easier for people to find out how they can contribute/volunteer
• Joomla! Community Magazine
• Add a connect feed and some informational modules.
• Highlight translation information.
• Site showcase link/image(s)/"Site of the month" review
• Fan art
• Joomla! Garden (design ideas)

Thanks,

 

Airton and Paul

[Jennifer Marriott]

Hopefully you will reserve spots for Official Joomla.org
announcements, JRD, JED, Forum, new Dev, shop and Doc site too. I see
the Community Home page as being the first stop that people might make
so it should be inclusive of all that makes up the entire community
and be the one stop guidance page to all of the other sites. That is
what I feel is lacking right now, there is no one place where you can
get a glimpse of the entire community at a glance that allows you to
really know what all of the individual sites do and have in terms of
information. As the Community site is for the community, and the
community comprises of such a broad range of users from developer to
site owners, I would like to see it be that grounding guidepost to the
rest of the sites.

Jenny

On Jan 2, 1:16 pm, Paul Orwig <paul.or...@community.joomla.org> wrote:
> After implementing the UI changes for the Community site, Airton and I would
> like to restructure the Community site home page content The primary goal
> for this step would be to make it easier for our users to find the content
> they are interested in, and to highlight what the different sections of the
> Commuity site consist of.
>
> Below are some ideas Airton and I have come up with along with ideas we have
> received (thanks Elin!). Please let us know if you have ideas on what
> content should appear on a restructured Community site home page!
>

>    - Make it easier for people to find out how they can contribute/volunteer
>    - Joomla! Community Magazine
>    - Add a connect feed and some informational modules.
>    - Highlight translation information.
>    - Site showcase link/image(s)/"Site of the month" review
>    - Fan art
>    - Joomla! Garden (design ideas)
>
> Thanks,
>
> Airton and Paul

[elin]

I think it would be good to have a module right on the front that says
things like

Need an professional ... go here
Need an extension ... go here
Want do see great sites .. go here
Are you a designer .. here's what we have for you
Are you a developer ... here's what we have for you
Beginner .... go here
Webmaster... go here
Need answers ... go here
Official information ... go here

We also should to some tuning work on the top cross site menu. I'd say
there should be a download link and a news link. Analytics say that
almost no one clicks on the resources or docs links So let's find more
effective ways to get people to those sites. It could just be a matter
of relabelling ... for example maybe docs should be FAQs and link
there instead of the docs home.

Elin

On Jan 2, 3:30 pm, Jennifer Marriott <marpomultime...@gmail.com>
wrote:

[Pierre Gazzola]

As helper on freenode #joomla.

Many user just want to see head lines of new news new updates etc.
Many cannot navigate the docs as they find it to hard ?

As Elin mention maybe some icon that direct to the new url.

a great example for the magazine was publish here
http://projects.komrade.gr/mockups/magazine.joomla.org/index2.php

Again international menu to language would be great on the front page.

[Jennifer Marriott]

Well the reason why I mention Docs is because there is a known set of
most asked questions or tutorials that should perhaps be linked from
the front page of the community site. This would help people become
more acquainted with the Doc site and would promote more use of it. I
think having a module that shows the latest posts in the general help
forum would be great to encourage people to take part answering and
asking questions there. <--- Just a few ideas.

I do think the a lot of people are not familiar with how a wiki works
and how to use it. It would be a great idea for an article for the
new magazine, how to use and contribute to the Doc wiki.

Jenny

On Jan 2, 3:06 pm, Pierre Gazzola <lafranc...@gmail.com> wrote:
> As helper on freenode #joomla.
>
> Many user just want to see head lines of new news new updates etc.
> Many cannot navigate the docs as they find it to hard ?
>
> As Elin mention maybe some icon that direct to the new url.
>

> a great example for the magazine was publish herehttp://projects.komrade.gr/mockups/magazine.joomla.org/index2.php

[Paul Orwig]

Thanks Jenny. As I read your ideas here are some of the questions that come to mind:

• What is the purpose of Community site, and how does that purposes fit in with the purpose of all the other joomla.org sites?
• What about boundaries: For example, where does "Community" stop and "Development" start (in terms of website content)?
• Is there one main portal, and if so is it "Home", "Community", or somewhere else? Or do we want to have a family of portals?
• Do we expect users to choose their own destination from the top level (domain) links? Could mega dropdowns there help users with finding what they want?
• What content belongs on the "Home" site front page vs. the "Community" site front page vs. "Documentation" etc.?

I think some of these questions (and your ideas) are perhaps best addressed in the context of the overall joomla.org redesign discussion. My thought on the focus for this "interim Community site home page content restructuring project" (ICSHPCRP for short :p) would be to try and keep it pretty simple and not try to venture too far into the scope of of the upcoming overall joomla.org redesign. 

My hope also with this ICSHPCRP was to keep it simple by not asking too much (if anything) from other sites in terms of setting up cross-site feeds and updates which may get replaced in the overall redesign. But there is no question that a lot of your ideas are improvements and maybe we need to put in that extra effort.

 

What do you think?

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[Paul Orwig]

Thanks Elin. My thoughts on your ideas in this email are similar to what I replied to Jenny's email a few minutes ago. They are great ideas, but I am not really sure which ones should be implemented now on the Community site on a short term basis, or perhaps do a less ambitious restructuring now and then allow the overall joomla.org redesign tackle the "final solution".

I don't disagree about rethinking some of the top level cross-domain links either. But that one does feel to me more like a discussion for the overall redesign project.

 

Are those analytics published somewhere, or if not could you send them to me? I would really like to get a look at them...

 

[Paul Orwig]

Thanks Pierre. I think the idea to have more summary headlines is a good one.

 

Can you please clarify what you mean by "Again international menu to language would be great on the front page." Are you suggesting adding more links for language translations, or something else?

 

Regarding issues with documentation, part of my thought is those issues should be raised with the team maintaining the Documentation site (maybe you already have). Maybe a better solution lies in the use of mega dropdowns for all top level domain links? And if so, I think that again may be a solution better implemented in the overall redesign project.

 

I don't want to venture too far off topic from the ICSHPCRP, but since I've mentioned mega dropdowns in a couple of responses in this thread, I will go on record as being in favor of them. Here's a favorable article about mega dropdowns by Jakob Nielsen, who is a pretty prominent authority on usability issues.

[Pierre Gazzola]

On Jan 2, 4:02 pm, Paul Orwig <paul.or...@community.joomla.org> wrote:
> Thanks Pierre. I think the idea to have more summary headlines is a good
> one.
>
> Can you please clarify what you mean by "Again international menu to
> language would be great on the front page." Are you suggesting adding more
> links for language translations, or something else?

This probably has more to do with the next version of the look of our
main page.

However Would it not be great to have some sort of welcome in all
language we support?
User click on there language and go directly to there language instead
of English only front page.

I suggested awhile back a plugin that would do just that just under
the search.

I know I understand english well writing it another story....
However a greeting that would take user to is choice be great.
Plugin I had in mind was mod_joomulus .

Drop down menu would even be great.

Hope I explain myself a bit better.

>
> Regarding issues with documentation, part of my thought is those issues
> should be raised with the team maintaining the Documentation site (maybe you
> already have). Maybe a better solution lies in the use of mega dropdowns for
> all top level domain links? And if so, I think that again may be a solution
> better implemented in the overall redesign project.

>
> I don't want to venture too far off topic from the ICSHPCRP, but since I've
> mentioned mega dropdowns in a couple of responses in this thread, I will go
> on record as being in favor of them. Here's a favorable article about mega
> dropdowns by Jakob

> Nielsen<http://www.useit.com/alertbox/mega-dropdown-menus.html>,

> who is a pretty prominent authority on usability issues.
>

> > joomla-wg-commu...@googlegroups.com<joomla-wg-community%2Bunsu...@googlegroups.com>

[Paul Orwig]

Thanks Jenny. Do you think that the existing links on the home page of the documentation site aren't effective (Start Here, Frequently Sought Information, Most Popular Pages, etc.)? I am not opposed to adding links to the documentation site on the home page of the Community site, but given our existing domain link structure I think the best solution to issues with the documentation site is to work with the team that manages that site.

 

I am interested to hear more from you and others about what the purpose of the Community site should be. If the answer is it's ultimately a portal with the purpose of pointing users to other sites, then my next question is what's the purpose of the www.joomla.org Home page/site?

 

I like your idea of a magazine article explaining how to use and contribute to the wiki. Do you know who from the team that manages the documentation site that we could connect with to ask for help writing that article?

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[Paul Orwig]

Thanks Pierre, now I understand what you were referring to earlier!

 

I took a look at the Joomulus module and visually it's pretty neat. I haven't seen tag clouds presented that way. Unfortunately, I don't think we're ready to support multi-language content on the Community site though. Maybe as you mentioned this is something to add to the list for the overall joomla.org redesign project.

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[elin]

I like the idea of a multilingual welcome. Maybe we could have random
or rotating text in the languages with transaltions or somethign like
that. I also at one point had made a module that pointed to each of
the language areas in the "international zone" on the forums. Right
now the community site doesn't really reflect the diversity of our
community, but some tiny albeit symbolic steps could help with that.
There are some other simple things we could do with that without
becoming a fully multilingual site. For example, each translation
team could have a few sentences in their language on their listing.
Same for the JUGs.

I think there is definitely a line between tweaking and redesigining,
but a few tweaks will help us through the next few months.

The "Home" page is mainly directed at people new to Joomla, it has
almost completely static content. If you talk to experienced users
they almost never go to that site. The forums are the place where the
community gathers to interact intensely and to help each other. The
community site is something different, a site aimed at people engaged
in the community. They want to read the articles, get involved in a
JUG or event, find translations, comment on things, look at some nice
sites, and maybe write their own blogs. Not as interactive as the
forums, but more interactive than j.org.

So some of the comments are more about the general issue of sites,
like tweaking the cross site menu which you are right was somewhat off
topic in this thread, and some are more specifically about the
community site.

One thing I think you should think about in terms of content ... I
really question the placement of the get involved page on j.org, which
pulls people off of the community site. I think that should if
anything pull people from j.org over to community. So if you would
think about that possibility, maybe even a section on that in the
community site, I'd really favor that. I'd also ask ... what about
moving the code of conduct to the community site? I think it's really
much more of a community item than a "something for new visitors"
item. Again, I don't like pulling people off of the community site to
get a particular page that is really community content.

Elin

On Jan 2, 8:39 pm, Paul Orwig <paul.or...@community.joomla.org> wrote:
> Thanks Pierre, now I understand what you were referring to earlier!
>
> I took a look at the Joomulus module and visually it's pretty neat. I
> haven't seen tag clouds presented that way. Unfortunately, I don't think
> we're ready to support multi-language content on the Community site though.
> Maybe as you mentioned this is something to add to the list for the overall
> joomla.org redesign project.
>

> > <joomla-wg-community%2Bunsu...@googlegroups.com<joomla-wg-community%252Buns...@googlegroups.com>

[Paul Orwig]

If we can find a good way to implement a multinational welcome then I agree that would be a good way to reflect diversity. I think your ideas of pointing to international forums, and possibly elsewhere like translation teams and JUGs to emphasize more international aspects without going 100% multilingual are all great ideas.

 

Thanks for your assesment of the differing roles of the "Home" site and the other sites including the Community site. What you said makes a lot of sense and it is very helpful to hear that.

 

Regarding the "get involved" page (do you mean the module on the home page or the separate "Contribute to Joomla!" page, or something else"), I agree that concept should be a central focus of the Community site. So my question is should we keep the same content on both sites, or should we remove it from the "Home" or "About Joomla" sites?

I also agree with your idea of moving the Code of Conduct to the Community site (but maybe the Docs site team or others disagree)? What would the protocol be to make that change: check in with the Docs site team, and then notify all the sites to change their links?

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[JM Simonet]

Concerning the multilingual aspect of community.org, I am afraid that
it could end as good intentions and not be effective at all.
Although to have welcome messages in one's language would look good,
where would it redirect to?
One proposal is to the specific forum.joomla.org language forum.
Other would be to the Translation listing with a changed interface.

Let's be realistic here. Most (99.9999 %) non-English speakers never
go to community.org EXCEPT to Translations to get the links to
registered packs.
Only ones visiting other aspects are people contributing to their
communities and speaking English, and even these are very few.

There is an ongoing project to create an international.joomla.org
site which has to be fully multilingual (using Joomfish for example)
and I suggest we rather wait this is done to propose on community.org
a link to anything really valuable.

Thanks for your attention.

>joomla-wg-commu...@googlegroups.com.

>For more options, visit this group at
>http://groups.google.com/group/joomla-wg-community?hl=en.

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[Claire Mandville]

One thing that may need to be considered for adding to the community
page is the global search box. With reference to Elin's "go here"
list. I suppose we would have to campaign for the security forum/
section/feed/vel

On the subject of the docs/faq count. A good list is Chris D's most
popular pages http://docs.joomla.org/Template:Most_popular_pages it
obviously doesnt show the incoming list but is still a good place.

Would there be a need to include the "non joomla.org" places such as
linked-in, etc?

C Mandville

[Pierre Gazzola]

What I feel sad is comment that user 99.9999% do not do this or that.

I would comment that if you look at the reason if a user do not
understand english
of course he will not visit front page docs and go only to forum in is
own language.

the attitude that change should not be done because they do not visit
x page.
Should be change to how can we provide better support for our non
english users.

In 2010 it is a shame on us as a community to only support english.
I know english is the international language however there is no
reason

why we cannot expand our ways.I am not saying this should be done
right now.

However it should be look at for the new version of joomla.org.

As I mention to Elin I can try to have a few servers from freenode
that could host joomla.
In German,Chinese,and a few others European language.

This is another avenue we could look at. I have never been in contact
with
the translation team or know who is involved or if they can take a
project to
have joomla in multi-language ?

Sorry if I sound like venting after been told to die not in pleasant
mood,
also at 57 should be allowed to be cranky once 1 year :)

[Ole Ottosen]

Hi Pierre,

 

Having a welcoming page in at least the 5-7 most used, or even more, languages does make lot of sense.

Think we would better help non-english visitors by making this directly at the main joomla.org site though.

 

Having a full mulitilingual community site in reality is not possible with so much dynamic and new content.

The maintenance in 50-60 languages would simply be too overwhelming, and we currently dont have the volunters to lift such a huge ongoing task.

 

But a simpler approach of welcoming and explaining 'What is joomla!' in other languages than english, and at these non-english pages provide links to other non-english onsite and offsite resources, is a must have for 2010. We certainly do agree on that.

 

Ole Bang Ottosen

Joomla! Translation Coordination Team

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[Pierre Gazzola]

Hello Ole!

Thank you to open my eyes you are correct it would be way to hard
as I never took in consideration dynamic content :( a big mistake
on my part.

So will ask it in this way could joomla.org not be mirror on non-
english
server i8n the most used one let say 3 to start with and a way to pull
all english content to that language ?

On all my site english is the only one I use so not sure how this
would work.

I have 3 FOSS server that can help with mirror I am sure.

More though for 2010 :)

Thank You to bring this up to me.

On Jan 3, 12:57 pm, Ole Ottosen <ole.otto...@joomla.org> wrote:
> Hi Pierre,
>
> Having a welcoming page in at least the 5-7 most used, or even more,
> languages does make lot of sense.
> Think we would better help non-english visitors by making this directly at
> the main joomla.org site though.
>
> Having a full mulitilingual community site in reality is not possible with
> so much dynamic and new content.
> The maintenance in 50-60 languages would simply be too overwhelming, and we
> currently dont have the volunters to lift such a huge ongoing task.
>
> But a simpler approach of welcoming and explaining 'What is joomla!' in
> other languages than english, and at these non-english pages provide links
> to other non-english onsite and offsite resources, is a must have for 2010.
> We certainly do agree on that.
>
> Ole Bang Ottosen
> Joomla! Translation Coordination Team
>

> > joomla-wg-commu...@googlegroups.com<joomla-wg-community%2Bunsu...@googlegroups.com>

[elin]

I think we should in the end do both. It might interest everyone to
know that just under half of visitors to the community home page have
their browsers set to other than en-US or en-GB. (That's for the last
12 months, it's actually a little higher lately, just over half.) So
that's about 2.5 million visitors a year whose preferred language is
not English, just to the homepage. The translations page visitors have
English selected less than 1/3 of the time. This profile is more
English than joomla.org, but only by about 4%.

I also think there are several different things ... being a
multilingual site and having some non English content are two very
different things. I love the way connect shows the international
nature of our community, and that's one reason for it to be on the
community home page. I also think a module point to all of the
resources for people who don't speak English or for whom English is
not their preferred langauge would be great. We could also actually
add some content about this :). For example ... would someone
necessarily know that we have non English forums on the sites? How
would they find out? I think it's worthwhile to point that out right
on the community site.

I don't want to get sidetracked to talking about joomla.org on this
thread, but it is definitely a prime site for going as multilingual as
we can, since the content is highly stable except for the occasional
announcement.

Elin

On Jan 3, 2:57 pm, Ole Ottosen <ole.otto...@joomla.org> wrote:
> Hi Pierre,
>
> Having a welcoming page in at least the 5-7 most used, or even more,
> languages does make lot of sense.
> Think we would better help non-english visitors by making this directly at
> the main joomla.org site though.
>
> Having a full mulitilingual community site in reality is not possible with
> so much dynamic and new content.
> The maintenance in 50-60 languages would simply be too overwhelming, and we
> currently dont have the volunters to lift such a huge ongoing task.
>
> But a simpler approach of welcoming and explaining 'What is joomla!' in
> other languages than english, and at these non-english pages provide links
> to other non-english onsite and offsite resources, is a must have for 2010.
> We certainly do agree on that.
>
> Ole Bang Ottosen
> Joomla! Translation Coordination Team
>

> > joomla-wg-commu...@googlegroups.com<joomla-wg-community%2Bunsu...@googlegroups.com>

[Paul Orwig]

Thanks Claire. We will be adding a global search box, that was announced in another thread.

 

Are you asking that we add link(s) to some of the security related areas? I'm not sure I understood that point.

 

I think I get your point about possibly adding links to other non-joomla sites such as Linked In (extending the idea of community/enabling more direct contacts?). I'll confess this makes me a bit queasy wondering if that stretches the role/purpose of the Community site, but I haven't put a ton of thought into it.  If you or others feel like this would be a good addition please say some more about that. 

 

 

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[elin]

We already have social connect although are not doing much with it.
But I think in the end we want to promote engagement on our sites
rather than push people off to other sites I'm not against "follow us
on Twitter" but there are limits. Hopefully we'll eventually have a
much more strongly engaging two way site, either on the community site
or somewhere else.

Once we have common identities across the sites that will all become
easier.

Elin

On Jan 5, 4:30 pm, Paul Orwig <paul.or...@community.joomla.org> wrote:
> Thanks Claire. We will be adding a global search box, that was announced in
> another thread.
>
> Are you asking that we add link(s) to some of the security related areas?
> I'm not sure I understood that point.
>
> I think I get your point about possibly adding links to other non-joomla
> sites such as Linked In (extending the idea of community/enabling more
> direct contacts?). I'll confess this makes me a bit queasy wondering if that
> stretches the role/purpose of the Community site, but I haven't put a ton of
> thought into it.  If you or others feel like this would be a good
> addition please say some more about that.
>

> On Sun, Jan 3, 2010 at 6:30 AM, Claire Mandville <mandvi...@gmail.com>wrote:
>
> > One thing that may need to be considered for adding to the community
> > page is the global search box. With reference to Elin's "go here"
> > list. I suppose we would have to campaign for the security forum/
> > section/feed/vel
>
> > On the subject of the docs/faq count. A good list is Chris D's most
> > popular pageshttp://docs.joomla.org/Template:Most_popular_pagesit
> > obviously doesnt show the incoming list but is still a good place.
>
> > Would there be a need to include the "non joomla.org" places such as
> > linked-in, etc?
>
> > C Mandville
>
> > --
>
> > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups
> > "Joomla! Community Working Group Leadership" group.
> > To post to this group, send email to joomla-wg...@googlegroups.com.
> > To unsubscribe from this group, send email to

> > joomla-wg-commu...@googlegroups.com<joomla-wg-community%2Bunsu...@googlegroups.com>