Your input for the new site/frontpage please

[Radiance]

Hi all,

I'm designing a new frontpage for the site.
It's supposed to be a very stylish, eyeballing entry page,
which just shows some random artwork,
and initiates newcomers.

i've never been good at making text content for sites.

Please comment here on what kind of information/sections need to be on the frontpage.

As mentioned, all other pages will be migrated to the wiki,
so the whole joomla system will be replaced with a 'welcome page' (what i'm making),
which takes you to all the places you need to go. (new gallery, forum, wiki, mantis, etc...)

it's sidebar also stays troughout the whole side, as a navigation/links bar. (on the left,
since most people have widescreen displays nowadays, you lose less space...)

thanks,
Radiance

[Karl vom Berge]

Some points that might be important:

We need a flexible, clean looking, extendible, themeable and easy to use web based CMS. I was thinking about Drupal: easy to install, much easier to use than Joomla, large user community, many themes and plugins.

We need integration of MediaWiki and phpBB into the CMS that we choose. By integration I mean: preferably the same look and feel, but more importantly, Single Sign On.

For Drupal there have been some efforts on integrating MediaWiki and phpBB, but I don't know for sure if these developments are stable and mature.

For the main website, we need:
* News and announcement section
* Luxrender section
- overview
- features (illustrated with images)
- technology
- supported platforms
* Resource section (this should be interactive in the sense that the community should be able to upload contributions)
- scene files
- materials (future, but can already be planned in): scattering models, light sources, hdr maps, etc...
- tutorials
- manual (link to wiki)
* Gallery
- luxrender gallery (demonstrations of all features "technical gallery")
- community contributed gallery
* Forum (link to phpBB)
* Development
- development team
- rules and stuff
- feature requests: an idea platform
* Download
- license
- platforms

For the idea platform, there is a system that is used by Ubuntu and Blender:
http://brainstorm.ubuntu.com/
Very similar to Dell's ideastorm (http://www.dellideastorm.com/).

This system is a much more visible way of aggregating comments, suggestions and feature requests from the user community than a forum. Important here is that the system has a voting system, so that popular ideas automatically bubble up on the top of the frontpage.
Of course such a system is only useful is we reach a critical user mass...

The system that Blender and Ubuntu use is an Open Source Drupal plugin:
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Brainstorm (note there are some limitations here: Drupal 5.0 and PostgreSQL DB).


For the resource section, in Drupal you can make new content types very easily:
e.g. for scenes you can make some mandatory fields: scene name, description, autor, image, so that you have a nice upload system.
For materials and other stuff similar content types could be made.


For the visual style:
* Keep the logo simple and clean looking, no textured logo, one color.
* Don't use textures on the site as backdrop for text sections (like the current site): this is straining for you eyes as the text does not read easily
* Use a lighter theme, dark text on light background.
* To be hip: use Web 2.0 style designs: minimalistic, flashy and usable.

This is my opinion, what do you guys think?

Karl

[Dade]

This is my opinion, what do you guys think?

I like the clean design of the sites you are showing as examples. Overall I think is very important to have a "wiki-like" approach where more people can easy work on the contents at different levels. Otherwise all the work will fall on the shoulder of a single person and it will be a very hard work.

I guess we have to not forget that Luxrender user base is manly formed by artists too so there must be same eye popping/flash graphic here and there.

[Karl vom Berge]

Dade: I agree, there shouln't be one guy responsible for updating the content of the site.

A CMS like Drupal allows multiple user roles like Administrator (be able to really change everything), contributor (can change or add content in the fixed basic website structure), guest... As such you can have multiple contributors who can share workload... (actually this is already possible in Joomla).

I am not a Joomla fan however

A wiki is nice for making manuals, tutorials, technology and algortihm explanations.
A wiki however is not suited for e.g. uploading scenes or materials, having a blog for the news section, etc...

Karl

[Radiance]

but, the drupal scares me a bit.

the issue i had is the complexity to let other people manage it.
you constantly need to teach them how to use it (as people come and go),
and i don't have time for that. (the big reason why joomla goes).

wiki's are generally accepted and anyone can use them,
although they don't offer the automation you mention.

i'll have to think about it ...

nevertheless your list of areas/sections is a good 'plan',
i'll analyse it in detail and try to make a workeable implementation.

Dade, regarding the flash/art stuff i'm working on that
more details soon

greetz,
radiance

[Radiance]

I think we can center around the forum to provide news and rss stuff.

the news and announcements forum (which is protected so nobody other than a few key people can post),
can serve an RSS feed.
a simple embedded rss client on the frontpage can serve this content about releases and project news on the front page.

we can also extend the rss functionality of phpbb to cater for more advanced distribution of data.

regarding single signon,
phpbb can share it's login table / session with gallery2 (which we use in the wip gallery),
and with some hacks i'm sure in can get mediawiki to sync from it too.

so in theory phpbb can be used as the 'ldap'-like server

the only thing left is stuff like material uploads, which should require some application someone can develop.
again since everything here is oss/free developing this part manually allows us to develop a flexible/custom http based delivery system straight to exporters. (something which should'nt be that easy in a system like drupal)

greetz,
radiance

[Karl vom Berge]

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but, the drupal scares me a bit.

Drupal is not that difficult if you just want to edit or add content. It can be difficult if you want to do advances things with it, but thats the case with any CMS.
Drupal's admin page is very clean looking and does not scare as much as Joomla's does. Basic actions are:
- a very clear link to add content (e.g. news-item, blog entry, new gallery image, new material model, etc...)
- content management section where you can edit existing content
http://drupal.org/node/109482

In any case we need to have a web-based system to add and edit the content on the website. I think we all agree on that point, no? We don't want a buch of static HTML pages that should be edited in vi in a ssh terminal.

Regarding the choice of web-based system: Wiki, CMS or what have you: point is that you always will have a learning curve. This is also the case with Mediawiki, as not everybody is familiar with the wiki markup.

A wiki alone is not an option I think, as you also need a forum, possibly a blog, etc...

Difficult choices

Karl

[Karl vom Berge]

the only thing left is stuff like material uploads, which should require some application someone can develop.
again since everything here is oss/free developing this part manually allows us to develop a flexible/custom http based delivery system straight to exporters. (something which should'nt be that easy in a system like drupal)

Develop a flexible/custom http based delivery system straight to exporters:

I don't think you want this, why not just have a material file?

In Drupal there is a way of creating your own structured content types. Developing a custom delivery system sounds more complex to me than using something off the shelve

Karl