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.
Now I'm not that familiar with Ning (or related sites) but today gave it a go and it appears to do what we want. However, I wish it was a little more open but everyone have a look and see what you think:
http://phpnetdesign2009.ning.com/
At least people who don't want to login can view everything including a list of recent activity. There is a forum, blog and photo album which would get the most use. I don't know, it's worth considering and was dead simple to setup.
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.
Cool, okay, come up with questions (everyone feel free to brainstorm on this) and they'll be added to the site. Heck, let's also create a news entry that links to it. A simple form should do. Always having a suggestion box around is an idea too.
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.
Likely we'll add several questions related to this on the survey as I'm sure there will be many ideas and complaints. And I'll start thinking about it too as sometimes us "people in the know" know it so well that we forget how certain parts aren't intuitive. We (the doc team) have had several discussions about related topics in the past so I'll locate those in the archives. A few open bug reports too.
Great! I've been working on ways to get people involved from the new homepage. This will be an important part of the site.
I love how Ubuntu displays it on their main site (ubuntu.com). The content for this is difficult but it's sloooowly coming along.
I'd like to be able to implement something this year absolutely. We should aim for the summer and see where we get.
Okay good, let's get 'er done.
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.
Nice, brainstorming is good. We do have a few features but they aren't well documented or maintained. For example, if you:
1. Go to
http://php.net/my
2. Enable "Show suggestions"
3. It suggests functions in the search box at
http://php.net/search.php
But honestly I don't think [hardly] anyone uses this hidden feature and I know no human maintains or worries about it. Rasmus is exploring ways to improve search on the backend (via the Yahoo search) so ideas are open there too. Hannes is also researching various Yahoo toolsets to implement.
Regards,
Philip