Re: Moving to a new PEAR website

On 2011-05-03 09:57, Alexey Borzov wrote:

Hi Michael, On 02.05.2011 3:01, Michael Gauthier wrote:

I propose we replace the existing website at pear.php.net with the new site. This will accomplish several objectives: - better promote pyrus as a tool for managing pear packages - let people know there's a pear2 - let people know pear is still alive - incentivize people to add features to the new site

This will also break all links to the old site... Of course, rewrite magic you describe will work, but what's the point of breaking and fixing?

Unless we want to keep the old site forever (look at the code and you'll agree we don't), we've got to get people using the new site. I outlined the reasons I think we should switch in my email.

Yes, I once tried to look at the code to fix something. It became obvious pretty soon that doing this will require quite a bit of commitment, as current code is not pretty and not documented. However, it has one benefit over potential code of pear2.php.net: it works now. I agree that we need to eventually move to a new site, but I don't see the point of renaming pear2.php.net to pear.php.net and pear.php.net to old.pear.php.net with a lot of breakage. Ok, how do you see a shift to a new site working? It's really hard for me to work on feature parity for PEAR2Web when no one is using it.

Maybe that's because no one uses the packages hosted there? What are the download stats for PEAR2? I can't imagine users not needing to read docs and report bugs, if such users did exist. I spent quite a bit of time myself digging around before I was able to run Pyrus on recent FreeBSD (detect_unicode problem).

Agreed. No one knows about them or uses them. How can we improve that without exposing PEAR2 more?

What do we gain if we suggest running pyrus.phar to users who wouldn't be able to run it due to an undocumented php config setting? What config setting are you referring to?

We definitely need to promote PEAR2 but removing a working site with a non-working one is hardly a promotion. Point well taken, but how should we be promoting it?

That being said, current PEAR website may definitely benefit from a face-lift, as having year-old "news" on the front page doesn't exactly convey the impression of a thriving project.

That was the reason for the new site design in the first place. The site design was intended for pear.php.net but since PEAR2 was the cool new thing at the time, the new design went there. In retrospect it was a good decision, because the old site's code base would have made it a much larger task (re: impossible for the amount of volunteers working on the site) to implement the new design.

So instead of having one pretty and feature complete site we now have one pretty site and one feature-complete one. Right, but who's going to work on pearweb? Odd maintenance tasks or bug fixes get done, but no one is actively developing the site, and no one has volunteered to do so.

Judging by the Router.php on pear2.php.net [1] the site now has about 7 different pages: 1) Front page 2) Search results page 3) Categories page (that's the same list that's on the front page) 4) Support page (a bit of static text, it doesn't look like it's linked from anywhere) 5) List of packages in selected category. Which is also broken because it shows the first release version of a given package rather than the last one. The presence of this bug speaks quite a bit on current popularity of PEAR2 and/or on whether we need a bug tracker from the very start. 6) Package info page. 7) File browser page. To sum it up: this looks more like a default page of Pirum installation [2] than like pear.php.net PEAR2Web is built on SimpleChannelServer which provided a feature set similar to Pirium. The intention is to add more features, but that's all that's supported at the moment.

That's what the pear2 site tries to accomplish. Regarding the site switch, what are you most concerned about losing? - bug tracking - integrated docs

Mostly these two and also statistics. These are the tools I use as the developer, if PEAR doesn't want to provide them there is little sense to host projects on PEAR. Would you be open to using the issue tracking provided by github? I also see download stats and integrated docs as important features (see integrated docs on the package details mockup in the link below). Those things aren't there now but they will be added.

We could, for example, fairly easily include all the pear1 packages on the new site.

Why not the other way round? This will help promoting PEAR2 quite a bit. The work to integrate PEAR1 packages in PEAR2Web is much smaller than integrating PEAR2 packages in pearweb. Again, I don't know who will do this work.

Also both PEAR2 and PEAR websites look "designed by professional programmers". PEAR2 is nicer, but that's because it has about zero navigation, when you add navigation for all features it will become as overcrowded and hard to use as PEAR one. I'd suggest finding a designer and usability specialist first and foremost.

I'd be happy to hear your suggestions for the pear2 site. I posted to the list several months ago looking for feedback. The current design was done by designers, i.a. and usability specialists.

http://pear2.php.net/PEAR2_Autoload Why does the installation help suggests installing the specific package version? That's an oversight and I will fix it.

On the right side we have "Release History" list going from 0.2.3 to 0.1.0. Below 0.1.0 there is a "Browse Files" button. When I click that button, what files do I browse --- 0.1.0 or 0.2.3? The code browser browses the latest release. I will make that more obvious.

There is no navigation on pear2 atm because those features don't exist. Designs exist for adding navigation that is similar to the pear1 site.

Where can we see it? Sure, mockups are available at:

http://stage2.silverorange.com/pearweb/work-gauthierm/www/ Earlier work is also visible at: http://labs.silverorange.com/files/pearweb-mockups/

[1] https://github.com/pear2/pear2.php.net/blob/master/src/PEAR2Web/Router.php [2] http://pear.phpunit.de/