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This page should be merged to Tiki website revamp.

TW.o Revamp

The Problem

For a brand new visitor who is evaluating CMS systems, Tiki presents an ugly face. Although Tiki packs more out-of-the-box features than nearly any other system, many first-time visitors are immediately put off by the look of the tw.o site.

For example, compare the tw.o home with:


It is time to "clean up" tw.o....

The (Proposed) Solution

View the work in progress at: http://info.tiki.org


1. Clean up the primary tw.o domain. This should be for new visitors only. Our first move should be to pick a snazzy, beautiful theme. Gary has done some fabulous work here...


2. The new landing page should have the following primary areas:

  • Get TW
    • Download
    • Installation stuff
    • Testing on opensource.com
  • Learn about TW
    • Recent TW news
    • About the TW project/community
    • links to Demos
    • links to Tutorials
    • links to FAQs
  • Help Others
    • links to the forum
    • links to the tw community (user pages)
    • links to Demos
    • links to Tutorials
    • links to FAQs
  • Read Docs
    • links to doc.tw.o
    • links to FAQs
  • Develop TW
    • Request a feature
    • Log a bug
    • Submit your code
    • Link to dev.tw.o


3. Secondary menu:

  • Tiki News
    • Read the latest
    • Submit an item
  • Featured Tiki
    • See the featured site
    • Submit a new site
  • Tiki Community
    • edu.tw.o
    • themes.tw.o
    • maps.tw.o
    • etc.


4. Move all UserPages to a separate subdomain (maybe community.tw.o ?)

5. Move all doc pages to doc.tw.o, as Xavi (and others) are currently doing).

6. Allow a "distributed search" from tw.o (to search the other subdomains)

  • The search results page now has direct links to continue the search on other TW.o domains.


7. Add a nice & updated video about basic tiki installation, configuration and usage.

  • This could/should be linked from the Get Started and Learn more pages (as part of the demos & tutorials).


8. Your idea could be here.

^

Sample

Sample of proposed TW.o home page.
Sample of proposed TW.o home page.


This uses the Andreas09 theme — it is very clean. Do you have a better idea?

Things I would like to modify:

  • Make the tools menu display always (instead of the drop-down).
  • Add a montage of photos to the top header bar. Lots of nice, free photos on http://www.sxc.hu/. I'll start uploading some here.

The Schedule

(Unless you set deadlines, nothing ever happens!)

  • Today — Aug 1
    Collect ideas, prompt discussion
  • Aug 1 — Aug 15
    Based on ideas, begin creating mockups and demos
  • Aug 15 — Aug 22
    Present final proposal, live demo, etc. to TW.o Community for final comments/voting
  • Aug 22 — Aug 31
    Begin moving pages, creating content, etc.
  • Sep 1
    Re-launch of TW.o


...page...

Discussion

Translations

?Hablas Espanol? I surely don't. Since this new portal will be the public face, we should try to translate as many of the portal pages (there aren't too many) into as many languages as possible. And the basic install-config-admin video. Can you help?

  • I can translate to Catalan (sure), and Spanish (while there is nobody else). Xavi.

Thoughts about (7) "the video thingy"

  • youtube or similar? or screencast (wink?)
  • on "GNU/Linux + Firefox"? (preferred option) or "Win XP + Firefox"
  • References:

Playground

Can a temporary tw.o subdomain be created to test things in a semi-live environment?
Sure! How about info.tiki.org?

About the page-top photos

Personally I don't like stock "people at work" photos much, and think they'd be especially inappropriate for an active community project. I suggest we ask people to submit photos, or give links to galleries, etc. Even unlikely pictures can be cropped, etc., to get a good effect. In other words, keep it real, not canned. (Gary)

  • Good point about using "stock" stuff. How about more abstract images? Personally, I really like these types of images — very colorful.

The theme

While Andreas09 is a good starting point, I think it'd be good to use an original theme or at least something not so familiar (and not so similar to Drupal's default theme). "Original" could mean simply using a different page background image, or maybe using ideas from a less-familiar theme, etc. I'll do some research and report back. (Gary)

Update: I looked at http://www.free-css-templates.co.uk/ and got a few themes to adapt for Tiki, with this site in mind. These are chromz, orangew2, underground, pixelgreen, and flan2. Sorry but I don't have the original urls to the demos off hand, and there's no search on that site. But these themes are just possible alternatives. They are just "roughed in" at this point — no PHP Layers styles, and other things apart from layout and basic styles are only done enough to give an idea of how they can be used for Tiki.

Or if anyone sees a theme at that site or other free (gpl or other public licensed) theme, I will try a Tiki version.

I uploaded the files for the above themes to info.tiki.org, and they can be viewed using the url
http://info.tiki.org/tiki-switch_theme.php?theme= with the theme css file name appended. Be advised that Site Identity has been implemented for these themes just enough to display the content but isn't optimized at all. (Gary)

  • (Is there a better way to organize these follow-up remarks?)
    • A tracker maybe?

    I think the site needs a makeover asap. The Andreas09 header graphic was designed to be the background for text of a certain size and placement. The light and dark areas in the gradient coincide with h1 and h2 text placed over them (so make sort of a blur that fits the text). This effect is lost if text is not placed carefully. At the least the background image needs to be changed, and I think the visual clutter in the topbar needs to be reduced.
    • Agreed. Currently there's an extra line at the top, soliciting input and directing folks to this page. This will eventually be removed. Luci also pointed out (rightly so) that the logo...um...er...sux.


    There are also specific problems now: in IE there is no top margin over the logo and title text; they are flush against the top of the page or, in IE6 they actually have a negative top margin.

    (I don't want to elbow in since ricks99 has taken the initiative here, and I'm pretty busy — as we all are — so will just oommunicate my ideas and see what people want to do. Err, I don't seem to have edit permission at info.tw.o anyway. ??)
    • Please elbow away. 😊 I put the demo site together last month and (desperately) solicited input. Now's the time... It is, at least IMHO, much better then the current TW "home."
      Baby steps....

Page content

I like the idea of highlighting Tiki sites in a module. This helps showcase Tiki and illustrate what the possibilities are.

About the content overall, I think more "meat" is needed (and I'll try to help add it). My first impression was lists of features and claims but no evidense or examples. I think it'd be good if there could be a simple, easy to understand overview to inform people of what Tiki can do, and then links and pages that get into things in more detail, for people that want to find out more, quickly. (Gary)


After going live:

  • The enthusiasm is great, but "Whatever you're looking for . . . Tiki has it!" is really not accurate. We all know that, so using such a slogan strikes me as marketing fluff. I suggest toning that down to something we can all live with, while keeping the enthusiasm level up. Suggestions coming soon.
    • Please join the search for a tagline here

  • I don't think it's necessarily a good idea to mention the alternatives by name ("like Wordpress" etc.). This makes the site seem more like a fan site than the official Tiki website IMO. And could even point people away from Tiki to these other choices. People are familiar with the types of sites enough already. They know what a blog is, etc., so don't need other examples pointed out.
    • Actually, I (ricks99) think that people aren't familiar. Many newbies think that wiki==wikimedia/wikipedia, blog==wordpress, etc. My thought was to leverage this type of "knowledge"
      This was done (primarily) for search purposes. This way the Tiki site could (potentially) benefit from folks searching for Wordpress, Wikimedia, etc. It was just an idea to better capture eyeballs. (-R)


    I want to work on a graphic or set of images that could go in that area and would illustrate the different site types/features. This could maybe be an alternative to the list that's there now.

Live Stats

I think it is useful (and helpful) to prospective Tiki-ers to see how active the community is. There is a Tiki Stats module that can show: Current Tiki version, total community users, total developers, and CVS activity. Does anyone know how to make these items dynamic? Is there a way to pull the user count from tw.o? And grab the developer count and CVS commits from CVS? Automatically?

  • The stats are now being updated automatically, via the Sourceforge RSS feed for the Tiki project.
    -R

Tikiwiki gear

Image Image
Image Image


spreadshirt.net is only in Europe. Would be nice to have suppliers for other continents...

  • Cafepress does for North America. In fact, someone has already registered the name tikiwiki there. I asked about this right here.
    -R


Add your thoughts here...

ML: I don't like "Read More (1210 bytes)". Starting in 1.9.8, article size will be off by default. fixed

Phase2


Sylvie asked on the dev mailing list: "Btw How does somebody know the existence of fr.tiki.org,
de.tiki.org.... There is no links to them form info.tw.org"
these links are added to menu


marclaporte: It would be nice something like this:
http://www.joomla.org/content/blogcategory/43/85/
http://plone.org/about/team

marclaporte: discuss about merge back all the news in one place (tiki.org) and use info.tiki.org mostly for more static/gateway purpose. So we'll have only one RSS for news (which we may filter with tags/topics/categories like release/events/etc). Use rewrite rules to redirect all the info.tiki.org news to their new home on tiki.org

marclaporte: A good RSS to promote: http://dev.tiki.org/tiki-calendars_rss.php?ver=2

marclaporte: The following discussion was seen on IRC 2007-12-13

Image
Copy to clipboard
(1:17:59 PM) VM: Hi, I am new to Tikiwiki, I know my website requiements, want someone to develop it using Tikiwiki pl.
(1:18:31 PM) VM: Where can I locate suitable professionals for this?
(1:22:23 PM) sylvieg: ... we had a page with the list of people working on tw ... I am wondering where this page is
(1:27:23 PM) sylvieg: VM: on http://tiki.org/tiki-browse_categories.php you have the category professionel 
(1:28:01 PM) sylvieg: VM: or send a message on the devel list

It would be better to have a specific page for this. We now have http://info.tiki.org/consultants

2007-11-21 discussion on IRC about changed to info.tw.o

[+]

More on *tw.o sites and themes

  • luci mentioned in #tikiwiki that it would be a good idea to use the same theme at all the *tw.o sites and just vary the color. The basic interface and navigation would be the same at all of them and this would make it easier for users to become familiar.

  • The theme for these sites could have, basically from page top to bottom, the row of *tw.o site links; the siteheader (logo/login, maybe banner); optionally a page-wide space for thumbs or other graphics (particularly at info.tw.o to highlight features)(this is also in SI, in terms of page construction and probably conditional with an 'if homepage'); then tiki-mid containing text content such as "about," news, recent activity, etc.; and finally the footer. Anyway, this kind of theme is something I'm working on now and can present later on.

  • I was thinking it would be good to put the links to the *tw.o sites at the very top of the page, using a style (graphic button, etc.) that makes them stand out, and maybe hover for a little description. This format would be used at all the *tw.o sites so in a way it'd be like a common menu with contextual changes for each site.

  • Many tw.o visitors don't seem to be aware of doc.tw.o and themes.tw.o, etc., so probably these support sites need to have a higher profile at tw.o. I think maybe some graphic icons/thumbs might be good to use, since the page now has so many text links. In the case of the themes.tw.o link, maybe a module rotating new theme screenshot thumbs would be good.

  • Since info.tw.o is Tiki's official "welcome" site, probably the "About" section on tw.o can be reduced; maybe also the articles space at tw.o can be smaller. These changes will make more room for content really needed by actual users such as "how/where to go to get help" and maybe "recent forum posts." Based on user feedback, these seem to be weak areas now.

  • For info.tw.o, one idea would be to highlight features using Mootools (iCarousel or other) in the homepage image div. That site would be good for Ajax experimenting since Javascript isn't used there so much (for mouseovers, flipping, calendars, etc.), reducing the likelihood of conflicts, and also because it is supposed to be more of an eye-candy presentation.

  • I'm assuming these changes would coincide with the 1.10 release (or would happen shortly after) and all the sites would be updated to that version. (Gary)



--
ML: I like the navigation for www.centos.org

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