Re: redesigning www.php.net

So... still on planet earth... but I meant tonight 3 days from now... right? Um, it makes some sort of sense in my head. Anyhow... I appreciate that you got back to the other company that started the reskinning project. I hope their feathers aren't too ruffled. Now, responding to the longer email. On Apr 1, 2009, at 4:16 PM, Philip Olson wrote:

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?

I want to be able to post annotated mockups of the redesign to garner feedback. The Wiki might be too difficult of a place to do that. Perhaps I could set up a blog specifically for this purpose. Post screenshots with notes and encourage people to participate in the comments. I'd email out a link to the blog post in the PHP email lists.

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@.

I'd like to link to this on the homepage (and maybe documentation pages) of PHP.net. Basically come up with a 'notice' that says we're doing a quick survey and leave it up there for a few days. We did this on Digg recently and got something like 35,000 responses. It's very useful.

Not all mirrors have statistics and even fewer include all information but here are a few: This includes referrer information: - http://au.php.net/stats/ This one is fairly busy: - 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.

Absolutely. I'd like to put a lot of emphasis on redesigning the manual. I'd love to hear your thoughts on the navigation especially. What do you think works... what do you think doesn't work.

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.

Great! I've been working on ways to get people involved from the new homepage. This will be an important part of the site.

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.

I'd like to be able to implement something this year absolutely. We should aim for the summer and see where we get.

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.

Absolutely. When I was talking with my friend Chris Messina about the site and this idea of adding JS where appropriate, his first thought was to the add some muscle to the search and so some live searching of the documentation as-you-type. This kind of thing could be kick-ass and because search is the most important thing on the site (imo) this would be a good place to invest in. I've been head-down getting some big release stuff out for Digg and preparing to speak at a couple of conferences. I promise this hasn't fallen off my radar... I'm as excited as ever about the project. Daniel

Regards, Philip