On 4-Oct-09, at 11:19 AM, Hannes Magnusson wrote:
Hey guys, this is Daniel Burka. One more time I'd like to apologize for my difficulty in tackling the project as a leader earlier due to my heavy workload. However... I left Digg last Thursday to pursue a new job with a few of the Flickr guys. I'm sure I'll still be very busy, but I'm taking the next three weeks as 'vacation' and I likely won't be as swamped as I was at Digg. So, if you'll have me, I'd like to at least contribute a little bit where I can, though I won't be a linchpin for the project obviously and hopefully I can speed things up rather than slow them down this time! Ok...
We have events and conferences, quick reference tips, where to get
help, mailinglists, how to contact 'us'..
All of these pages are missing tons of info though, and we also lack
an very important page: "how to contribute" :(
I agree, "how to contribute" is important.
Absolutely. I think there should be an introductory piece about contribution front-and-center on the homepage that leads to better (yet simple) tips on getting involved further into the site.
There is a sitemap available on http://php.net/sitemap.php but not
even that contains all webpages or hidden gems.
I have no idea how do organize it or how to present all this :]
I spent some time trying to narrow the focus of the navigation. I'll write a separate email tomorrow to have that discussion on its own as it will become a complex email I'm sure.
It might be good to take a look at some other open source projects and see how they organize their pages. Mozilla.org provides a nice example. I particularly like how they dedicate space to a large "get involved" graphic.
Yes, this was a nice improvement to the Mozilla site when HappyCog recently redesigned it. I think we can do even better than a glitzy graphic and give people real tangible ways to get involved very quickly.
You are damn right though, the manual and download/release info is the
most important things and we really need to do something with the
download page.
Yes, the download page is unnecessarily confusing. This could be greatly simplified.
The manual pages is a bit more problematic. We can't do very much
there other then adjust the CSS and improve the TOC/manual notes. The
actual markup of the _manual_ pages (excluding notes, TOC, and
everything around it) is pregenerated as you can see by clicking 'view
source' on any manual page.
I find that the manual pages work pretty well for my needs.
I think the styling could be better and the organization of the menu system might be improved, but updated the styles here might be a simple first step. I took a stab at this months ago when I was working on the redesign. See the one file on this.
I don't agree that a new identity is needed at all. The currently logo
is quite "famous" and I don't consider it to be awful enough that the
top priority should be to replace it.
Don't get me wrong, I'd love to brush it up a bit, but creating a
totally new one is not something I think we can do, nor is it "within
our rights" :]
I'm sorry to hear that. Who has the "right" to update the logo?
Good. Redesigning the logo is a tempting place to start (and I had toyed with a few ideas early in my redesign stuff) but it's a bit of a red herring. It also opens a whole area of political issues that probably aren't worth tackling as they'd become a distraction. One thing I did play with was simply taking out the three letters and removing the effects – simple, clean, and modern. See some of the files.
Unsure how I feel with making the mascot into the logo.. I'd much
rather prefer to brushup the current one a little.
If we removed the oval background from the current logo we could make it work with a more contemporary design. We still have a problem though. It is very dull. There is a perception that PHP is stagnant and we need to counter that perception with something that is fun and fresh!
Perhaps if we developed a stylized version of the elephant we could incorporate it into the site; not to replace the logo, just to give some life to the page.
Again, I'm really afraid of bike shedding on this one. A clean simpler version might be nice, but making a 'new' logo or an icon could easily become a huge distraction.
-------------------------------------------------
I've posted a few Photoshop comps I pulled together months ago to give you an idea of the direction I was headed. Take or leave anything you see here. Please don't take the colors seriously at all... I think there are even two link colors in some of the files and the teal one especially doesn't work that well. A few general notes:
1) There's an example of the simplified logo here. Would be interested in hearing your thoughts. I think clean, professional, and modern are the important attributes of a PHP logo or wordmark. Fun, exciting, etc. wouldn't be my first goals.
2) I've greatly simplified the menu. I'll try to explain where all the bits would go in tomorrow's email.
3) The homepage is very incomplete. The treatment of the conferences is especially weak as it would force too much content on the left and plus it all looks cluttered. Super pared down simple would be nice if we can manage it.
4) The writing on PHP.net is extremely verbose and overly conversational. I think that a lot of places (such as the description of what PHP is) could be shredded and made much simpler. I'm a decent writer (was a history major) but I'm no copywriter. Perhaps it would be valuable to trick a real copywriter into helping us out here!
5) I can't stress enough how rough these are. Please look at them with an open mind.
http://www.whitelands.com/daniel/php/concept2s-home.png
http://www.whitelands.com/daniel/php/concept2s-documentation.png
http://www.whitelands.com/daniel/php/concept2s-downloads.png
http://www.whitelands.com/daniel/php/concept2s-community.png
Daniel
