1) Start a communal area for communicating the project. The PHP Wiki?
This may work if people want to submit ideas and brainstorms for specific topics, but for discussing it's difficult. How do you envision this working?
2a) Start a research phase to find out how people currently use PHP.net. For instance, I'd like to run a survey on the PHP.net homepage for a few days and I'd like to delve into the site stats as much as makes sense.
Coming up with a survey sounds feasible and it could also be sent out to a few lists like php-general@. Not all mirrors have statistics and even fewer include all information but here are a few:
This includes referrer information:
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http://au.php.net/stats/
This one is fairly busy:
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http://us3.php.net/stats/
It appears the majority of people arrive via the php.net/foo search which indicates the manual is the main reason. We could implement tracking to see where people end up going but more likely we'll make educated guesses. All of the captured search terms from stats/ appear manual related too. Speaking of the manual, this effort should also include a hard look at its navigation/presentation.
2b) Get feedback from current site contributors and users. What things have you/they always wanted?
One part I'm working on is a "How to get involved" section which should be seen from the front page. I'm sure people will come up with many more ideas for desires but know that's one. Let's add a question like this to the survey.
3) Settle on a _limited_ scope for the redesign. Include follow-up stages so good ideas are not discarded.
Fair enough, as maybe we'll implement something in 2009.
4) Start working on user interface concepts and gather feedback.
I think it's okay for us to join the modern world and implement useful "fancy" features where appropriate. In the past we've tried hard to remain slim and simple but if adding features with [for example] jQuery or YUI will help us achieve greatness... then let's do it.
Regards,
Philip