On 05/03/07, Brett Parker iDunno@sommitrealweird.co.uk wrote:
I think we've got a hard to maintain, overly complicated front page that's trying to impress (and, IMO, failing).
Assuming you're not talking about the wiki engine but are referring instead to the actual wiki-code of the front page, I wouldn't argue that the syntax looks horrible, but that's specific to MoinMoin. If you'd like to work on it, I'd love to see one or more alternative proposals that we could all choose from. I think if you want to remove all the layout stuff which is what makes it so complex, you'll essentially be left with the very basic formatted text look as it was when Jonathan installed it. I think that'd be a step backward, but maybe you can arrange a user-friendly front page out of that where I failed ... I am totally new to MoinMoin after all.
I assume the front page will also need looking at again, if and when someone gets round to trying out a new wiki theme, so revisiting it then may also reduce the code's complexity if some of the content moves out into the theme (though I think we should keep the changable content, like the next meeting dates, in the main page, so we can all easily update it).
A reasonable set of links to outside documentation is always good, there's a lot of useful information out there, and as far as possible we shouldn't duplicate it but instead link to it. If people find something useful (for example: http://www.davidpashley.com/articles/writing-robust-shell-scripts.html), could also be useful to add links to the "major" projects that we all use - such as openoffice.org, gnome, kde, etc
Obviously linking out in pages where it's relevant is required - your shell scripts example has, therefore, been linked from the TipsTricksAndWorkarounds page. The question I raised was about whether a generic Links page was really necessary ... You're right we could add links to the major projects, I'm just not sure how useful that is ... still, it sounds like there's quite a few other people who think there's a purpose to it, so that's good enough for me. I only mentioned it in case it had been created by Jonathan just to avoid deleting outright the small number of links that were on the front page.
- just because we *can*
reinvent the wheel doesn't mean that we should.
Not sure I understand this bit, tho! ... what are we re-inventing?
TTFN,
Peter.