I haven't explored the site thoroughly, but here are some comments:
- in general, the new site looks prettier
- it doesn't look good to have a "Tapestry 5.2.3 -- canceled" post on
the front page. It's scary and you have to read the rest to know that
it's just a release that didn't pass the vote. I know there's now a post
above that saying 5.2.4 beta release, I'm commenting about the concept
of "fear-about-the-future-of-tapestry" content with such visibility. Do
we want things like that to see what potential new users get on their
first visit?
- news feed titles have too large a font
- there's too much text in the left column. I know there are a lot of
benefits and features to tapestry, but it looks intimidating.
- in the "create your first tapestry project" tutorial, don't make the
user choose an archetype or a tapestry version. Write the instructions
for the latest stable version. It's better to have that be out of date
when a new version comes out (because it still will work) than have the
user decide at this stage. Same for the groupId, artifactId, version and
package. It's a test project the user is creating, those values are not
going to matter. Give the defaults so people can copy and paste the
command and have the project created, built and run.
- the big red scary warning about the project layout changing across
different versions has no reason to be. By the time the user has this
problem he will know how to solve it.
- after the test project has been created, give the user some pointers
on where to find things (pages go in src/main/java/com/example/pages,
page templates go in webapp). I know there is a link to the tutorial but
if this first experience is too frustrating, people might not even
bother to go there.
- add something to the archetype with commented out code that the user
can uncomment and see something cool happen. It has to be a few lines
only, to be easily understandable, and clearly link components in the
template with their methods in the page class.
- the tapestry tutorial starts unnecessarily verbose about topics not
really related to me getting code running and out the door. Strip it to
the essentials. If you want to mention Struts and the Servlet API
compared to the tapestry way, mention them in a separate chapter so they
are easy to find / skip as needed.
- there is no table of contents for the tutorial and no indication of
how long it takes to complete.
- there are too many callouts, warnings and decorations in the tutorial.
It is very distracting visually and that makes it hard to follow. It's
impossible to scan the pages to get a feel for what you've got ahead of you.
Basically, what most of the above boils down to is: make the barrier to
entry as absolutely low as possible. All the magic tapestry does for you
and how great a framework it is will not matter if people don't get past
the initial experience.
El 19/11/10 22:15, Howard Lewis Ship escribió:
We're still working out the kinks ... and I've been working hard on revising
the tutorial ... but at long last, we're debuting the new Tapestry Web Site:
http://tapestry.apache.org/
Feedback is encouraged; just post to users@tapestry.apache.org with [SITE]
in the subject.
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