[EuroPython] Web site wonderings

[Dario Lopez-Kästen]

Jacob Hallén wrote:

> Now that the website starts to fill with information, I have some questions 
> about how this Plone thingie works:
> 
> 1. I find the "About" and "Log in" boxes to be stuff that visitors to the site 
> wouldn't wnat to see. Will they be gone from the production site?

yes, it is a standard Plone thngie, that we just haven't removed yet.

> 2. Is the "Navigation" box the way people are supposed to navigate the site?

Yes and no. The Navigation box will show the puslished folder structured 
to the user, but it wont show the individual pages. This is a setting 
that can be changed, however (imo) it would be preferable that the main 
page of each folder was used to link to the rest of the pages. For instance:

http://plone.org/documentation/

the nav box here only shows the folders that are available under 
documentation. These folders are the "main areas" of the /documentation 
folder strutcture. The main page (the 'index_html' page) of the 
/documentation folder, however, has links ti the individual documents.

> 3. What defines what stuff gets added to the tabs along the top? Having both 
> the Navigation box and the tabs at the top seems to be redundant.

This is defined on a portal level. The tabs may, for instance, 
correspond to the root level folder structure, i.e. if it is decided 
that the portal should not use the Nvigation box, the the tabs can be 
used to provide links to the "main sections" of the portal.

The tabs are also usefull to provide a link to "meta-parts" of the 
portal. For instance the 'news' tab will always work even if there is no 
'news' folder. It simply points to a template that displays all 
available news. The same can be done for other things, ie talks, papers, 
interviews, etc.

> 4. Somebody said that people will have to make an account to register papers 
> and register for the conference. I hope this is not true. If you can't 
> register by just filling in a simple form that is at the end of a link saying 
> "Register here", we have failed badly.

Can you elaborate? What is wrong with registering to the conference in 
general? I.e. by registering to the site you register to the conference, 
either as submitter or participant. This is not a bad thing imo - it al 
depends on what semnatics we attach to the act of registering.

Also, there is an important distinction that we have not made clear yet 
- were to draw the line between the EuroPython Society (EPS) and the 
EuroPython Conference (EPC), arraangeed by the EPS.

The site is constructed as being the EPS site, with the most important 
and prominent feature of it being the current EPC.

So som of the discussed features spring from this distinction, for 
instance registering.

Note however that the registering form may be as simple or as 
complicated as we wish. To get back to your question, do we have reason 
to believe that people whose paper is not accepted wonät be coming at 
all to the conference?

> 5. I think we are using the event calendar in a bad way. We should mark days 
> when specific things happen, instead of marking off periods. Right now, we 
> have the event " EarlyBird Registration Ends!" set up for 1 April - 1 May. 
> This event should only cover 1 May.

Uh? That is not what i see here and not the way we set it up...

ah, i see. this is a bug in the display code for the Plone calendar. The 
  event is in fact 0 (zero) minutes long but the (stupid) calendar 
displays it as a month long event. We are looking into it, but for the 
tie being pelase make such milestone-kind of events exatly one minute 
long, for display reasons.


> 6. Are visitors expected to understand that they need to open the "A-Z EPC 
> 2004" box in the Navigation box in order to find the contents of the site?

Well, yes. We had a lengthy discussion on this on irc a couple of weeks ago.

I ****REALLY*** would like to point out the fact that *EVERYBODY* was 
suppopsed to have come back to us with feedback and observations like 
"should it really look this/that way" for the past 3 weeks. Not now, 
but, like, last week at the latest.

Now, the focus should of course be to makig things better, so we are 
open to any alternative suggestions that may arise. However, merely 
asking whether something should look like that or not without a 
couterproposal will get very few things done.

The way it was setup up previously was like this:

EPC 2004 at the top, it being a symlink to /conferences/epc2004

however, since it opened up the navigation box in the bottom half, it 
was deemed to be unusually hard for visitors to understand, thus it was 
changed to be the way it is now.

It is not the best solution but the best so far. Any opinions on 
alternative ways of doing this, please give them *NOW* so that we have a 
chance to change it.

> Jacob

Apologies for the somewhat harsh tone of this mail, it is not directed 
at you personally, but to the list in general - it is bad style to 
ignore bea's pleas for feedback during three weeks and then, when 
everybody suddenly realises that "shit, we need to have the website 
online yesterday" all kinds of opinions, some not so nicely presented, 
come flying by.

But, like I said - focus is on getting a great website, so keep those 
questions and suggestions coming.

/dario