On Fri, Jan 4, 2013 at 1:12 PM, Kay Schenk <kay.sch...@gmail.com> wrote: > On Thu, Jan 3, 2013 at 4:09 PM, Rob Weir <robw...@apache.org> wrote: > >> On Thu, Jan 3, 2013 at 6:38 PM, Kay Schenk <kay.sch...@gmail.com> wrote: >> > Here's is the latest/final draft for the proposed new user portal web >> site >> > home page incorporating News scrolling: >> > >> > http://www.openoffice.org/test/ >> > >> > I am invoking "lazy consensus" for this change. If I hear no complaints >> by >> > Sunday 1750 PDT, I will implement this change. >> > >> >> I can see how this makes it easier to manage the news articles. >> Previously we kept the most recent articles on index.html and >> "rotated" the older ones off onto an archive page. This was a manual >> process, an extra set of steps. With your new SSI mechanism we just >> keep all of the news articles in a single SSI file, the are displayed >> on the home page and the user can scroll through them. So from the >> perspective of the author of the news stories this is a big >> improvement. Thanks for looking into this! >> >> However, from the perspective of the page reader, this has two liabilities: >> >> 1) Aesthetically, from a design perspective this doesn't work well, >> especially that scroll bar. IMHO, it does not look like a >> professional page. >> > > comments duly noted on the scroll bar...I could look for some better > styling on this. > > >> 2) Impact on page load time. As we add more stories to the SSI, >> especially stories with images/photos (which I'd like to start doing) >> the page size is going to increase. Eventually this becomes a problem >> and we're back to manual rotation of the stories to an archive page. >> > > This is certainly true. I was thinking we would eventually "cut off" older > items from the bottom of the ssi file. Nothing to prevent any committer > from doing this. > > >> >> Since this is the visitors first impression of the project, I wonder >> if it is worth exploring further to see if there is a way to address >> these issues? As I mentioned before, the ASF home page has a "latest >> activity" panel that avoids both of these problems: >> >> http://www.apache.org/ >> >> Can we copy what they do? >> > > ummm...not sure about this. We would need to do more thorough investigation > here. Right now, I can not easily determine how this column is generated -- > manually vs something else. >
I did a little research on how the ASF home page works. You cans see the source here: http://svn.apache.org/repos/asf/infrastructure/site/trunk/ index.html is here: http://svn.apache.org/repos/asf/infrastructure/site/trunk/content/index.html and Latest Activity looks like this: <h3>Latest Activity</h3> <div class="section-content"> <p><em>This is an overview of activity going on with our projects. SVN commits, bug reports, tweets, you name it</em>.</p> </div> {% for e in twitter.list %} <div class="section-content"> <a href="{{ e.url }}">@</a>{{ e.title|safe }} </div> {% endfor %} {% for e in svn.list %} <div class="section-content"> <a class="svn" href="http://svn.apache.org/viewvc?revision={{ e.revision }};view=revision">r{{ e.revision }}</a> {{ e.message|safe|truncatewords_html:20 }} ({{ e.projects|safe }}) — <a href="http://people.apache.org/committer-index.html#{{ e.author }}">{{ e.author }}</a> </div> {% endfor %} {% for e in jira.list %} <div class="section-content"> <a class="bug" href="{{ e.url }}">{{ e.title|safe }}</a><br/> {{ e.content|safe|truncatewords_html:20 }} </div> {% endfor %} </div> So they are iterating over twitter.list, svn.list and jira.list. But it is not leaping out at me where that data comes from. Presumably it is RSS/Atom feeds, but I don't see the glue that connects this. But in any case, if this is doable within the CMS -- as it appears to be -- then one option would be for us to format our news stories as Atom or RSS feeds. Then those can be sucked into a panel on the homepage. But the nice thing then is the same logic could be used to put in a list of new bug reports, or forum posts, or check-ins, or conference paper submissions, or whatever other useful info we can find a feed for. We set up a generic capability that could find other users. -Rob > In any case, removing the scrolling styling from the current ssi would > certainly do away with the bars. If we wanted to keep all the news items in > one file but only bring in like the last 10 or something, there MAY be a > way to do that. You could certainly do it either with server side JS or a > cgi. > > Anyway, I will hold up on this change for now I guess. > > I agree that the scroll "bars" don't look very professional. I may find > some nicer looking scrolling mechanism... > > > >> -Rob >> >> > Thereafter all "news" items will not be added to the home page directly >> or >> > to /news/index.html, but to /news/newslist.ssi (this is a text file, not >> > html), LIFO order, maintaining the styling you see for other items there. >> > >> > -- >> > ------------------------------------------------------------------------ >> > MzK >> > >> > "No act of kindness, no matter how small, is ever wasted." >> > -- Aesop >> > > > > -- > ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- > MzK > > "No act of kindness, no matter how small, is ever wasted." > -- > Aesop
