Re: PHP.net Update

On Oct 5, 2009, at 1:14 AM, Hannes Magnusson wrote:

On Mon, Oct 5, 2009 at 06:55, Burka Daniel <daniel@silverorange.com> wrote:

On 4-Oct-09, at 11:19 AM, Hannes Magnusson wrote:

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...

Ofcourse we'll have you. We need all the help we can get :) Watch out though, vacation time is supposed to be used for.. getting time off :)

Shhh... :)

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.

It actually took me few seconds to find it.. The image didn't really tell me anything until I read the text, and the location of it was somewhere in a corner where my eye didn't really expect to see anything important - it looked just like a random logo first :] Its definitely better then what we have (nothing) though :)

Let's write the thing first. Volunteers? I'm in, as one of them.

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.

(Your attachment) I was kindof hoping for a bit more "bling bling". Big fat "download" button for the tar.bz2 archive hiding the .tar.gz option with a smaller text beneath it "or download the .tar.gz" or something. Same for the windows, the two installers should be presented with a bling bling, with an option to click "extras" (or whatever) to see the alternative downloads. Just an thought :) I don't quite know which Windows downloads are supposed to be there.., or if any are supposed to be there at all. Can't remember what Pierre sad last time we talked about it..

Maybe this bling bling you speak of is something to look into at stage #2. But for Windows downloads, I believe windows.php.net will be the permanent home for this (at least, as of PHP 5.3.0 currently) which will also allow for a cleaner download page. But does that mean mirrors won't be used for Windows downloads? Slightly offtrack, but something we need to determine.

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.

Interesting idea.

I like the language selector, style of breadcrumbs and whitespace. The handling of user notes is its own topic and something to deal with later... but I do like this cleaner look. And sometimes it's difficult to find an extension (determine its category) so hopefully we can find a way to include the alphabetical extension listing in the navigation. Information from this: - http://php.net/manual/en/extensions.alphabetical.php Maybe via a select box?

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.

I think you are to addicted to Facebook :P Aside from the coloring, its just letters.. not a logo anymore :(

The logo font remains, but the current logo style really wouldn't fit here... so maybe the logo can adapt and not always contain an oval.

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.

I think we need to reconsider how we present the event calendar too. Simply listing bunch of things there is confusing and overwhelming. Only listing the items for the users country with the option to 'see all' would be heckofalotmore efficient and would leave us with a lot more space for other things.

And something more similar to a select box. If people really want to see all events then go to the calendar page, otherwise, let the rest of us live in peace (and give us more space, as Hannes suggested).

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!

We could contact the current and former editors of the php magazines..

I'm sure we can find several qualified people for this, and hopefully Steph.

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

I was thinking a bit more dynamic. Big fat bling bling to draw attention to things like "get involved" which when clicked exposed bulletlist of links or something? The risk there is we would probably have to update the bling quite regularly so the page doesn't become stale right away.

I prefer simple over bling, but honestly am not sure what bling means here. Regards, Philip