Re: [Xen-devel] Proposals/changes for a new Wiki Front-Page - need input/mods/creative proposals

[Lars Kurth <lars.kurth.xen@xxxxxxxxx>]

Rolu,

thanks for the feedback.

xen" and "help with xcp" it would be nice if there were a few lines at
the top of the page explaining which is which, so (new) people can
have a better idea of where to look.

So you mean a link to Xen and XCP from the headline, or a tagline describing what Xen/XCP is? Two lines are probably OK; more would probably break up the navigation too much.
 

The descriptions from
http://xen.org/products/ and a link to
http://wiki.xen.org/wiki/Xen_/_XCP_/_XCP_on_Linux_Overview would work.
The latter is already linked in the "getting started with xen" column
but would be better off at the top since it gives a feature table of
both.

I am wondering whether Xen Features / XCP Features in one of the boxes would not be better.
 

As someone who started with Xen not long ago, I much prefer dedicated
link pages over Category: pages. The latter just give a big unsorted
(alphabetical doesn't count, needs to be sorted by subtopic to be a
useful sort) list of pages of widely varying scope and usefulness.
It's better than nothing, sure, but a page that sorts them by topic or
purpose or something (much like this proposed front page really) is a
lot better.

How about a compromise? Category pages have two parts:
1) A fixed part that can be used for any content, such as lists of important articles by topic or other ciriteria
    An example of this is http://wiki.xen.org/wiki/Category:Host_Install (and some of the pages linked from it)
2) The auto-generated index

I know that some people are don't like category pages. However, until somebody steps up and provides an alternative, which to do well requires
a) Classifying articles
b) Grouping them by topic or purpose
c) Encoding that grouping in some manual index
d) Keeping these up-to-date

... the category pages are all we have and are a lot better than what we had in the old wiki. And they are self-maintaining.

The fact that we are having this discussion is actually good. I am open to suggestions and maybe we just need a small number of manually maintained indexes (or categories with maintained content at the top). Maybe to make this really work and get better navigability we need some degree of ownership in the wiki: i.e. community members owning content, categories, etc. and being responsible for classifying, grouping and making it more accessible.

I also started experimenting with shortcut boxes on pages such as http://wiki.xen.org/wiki/Xen_Overview & http://wiki.xen.org/wiki/Getting_Started and wanted to know what people thought of these and whether these improve navigability.

Lars

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