[rfc] notes on a bazaar homepage refresh

[Karl Fogel]

Martin Pool <mbp at canonical.com> writes:
> beuno, jml, and I talked about refreshing the bazaar homepage to make
> it more attractive and to better address our audience.
>
> Some notes are below; comments welcome.

Great ideas!

> functional requirements:
>  * if we split from a wiki, we want the web site to still be easy to update
>  * in particular want it to be easy to update for new downloads

Well, why not keep the site in bzr? :-) Just as plain HTML/CSS files, I
mean.

Keeping it as a wiki would be fine if it didn't interfere with visual
layout (which is important on a home page).  However, I think the wiki
does interfere with making things look exactly the way we want, am I
right?  Not sure how to do arbitrary layout in the wiki syntax.

Regarding overall layout: the Subversion home page (which has various
visual distractions that we *don't* need to emulate) is laid out into
four general quadrants:

          [Get Subversion]           [Get Help]

          [Report a problem]         [Join in Development]

While we don't have to emphasize those exact same areas, it might be
good think of overall usage categories: what are people coming to the
site for?  Can they easily find what they're seeking?

In other words, instead of thinking of audience in terms of individual
identities, let's think in terms in functional categories.  The same
user may come one day to get help, another day to report a problem.

Because bzr is especially trying to introduce itself to newcomers, it
might be good to lead off with the "Why Bazaar?" ("What Can Bazaar Do
For Me?") area.

>  * want a good news feed, and this too could be taken from launchpad
>  * easy to update both the style and content
>  * new wiki theme without the header, etc, but matching
>  * Bazaar brought to you by very large prime numbers :-)
>  * could theme the documentation site into this too
> 
> questions:
>  * how to do this with IS

If non-wiki solution, I assume we'd use the "push-and-update" story from
http://bazaar-vcs.org/BazaarForWebDevs (?).

>  * more visibly linked to Canonical
>    - move to bazaar.canonical.com?

What will do the bzr project the most good -- being linked with
Canonical or with Ubuntu?  Could the project live at bazaar.ubuntu.com
(with bzr.ubuntu.com as alias)?  Or would those be reserved for bzr
services related to Ubuntu already?

> use cases:
>  * people thinking about using bzr

Yes.  Maybe we should break that down into:

   + people new to version control thinking about bzr
   + people coming from centralized VC (proprietary or svn or cvs)
   + people coming from other decentralized (git, hg, bk)

A side note about the other-dvcs case: we ought to be looking in their
issue trackers for unimplemented feature requests that are doable in &
consistent with bzr.  It never hurts to implement features that people
say they want and that others are not providing!

> people have different ways to decide what to do:
>  * scan the documentation,
>    - look for docs that specifically relate to them:
>  * social proof - eg who's already using it, and what did they say
>  * news and signs of activity
>  * just download it and poke at it
>  * screenshots
>  * screencasts
>  * faq or bug lists
>  * look at the source code

Take a look at http://subversion.tigris.org/ for how we organized a very
similar list.  Again, there's a lot of visual distraction around the
core site, so I'm not holding that up as some kind of ideal, but there
are some good presentation ideas there I think.

> must:
>  * word "Bazaar" and the logo
>  * concise explanation of what Bazaar is
>  * why Bazaar rather than something else
>  * who's using Bazaar
>    - high-profile ones, with their icons
>    - link to "more"
>    - link to
>  * commercial support is available
>  * community support is available
>  * if interested in using bzr, what to do:
>    - download it
>    - how to start using it
>  * download page should be prominent and simple
>  * tips & tricks
>  * faq
>    - in the lp answer tracker?
>  * places you can host bzr - launchpad, debian, others
>  * plugin directory
>  * how does it work
>    - in my ide
>    - with my language?
>    - as a web developer, documenter, etc
>    - bug trackers
>    - microsoft office, sorry, no
>    - build tools
>  * bzr branch lp:bzr
>  * news and feeds:
>    - releases
>    - announcements
>    - commits to the project
>    - feed of commits on all branches
> 
> could:
>  * tip of the day?
> 
> must not:
>
> technicalities:
>  * host it in a branch, pull from that branch, then
>  * or could use bzr-upload to push changes to the site
>  * write our own code to generate this?
> 
> team blog?
>  * would we generate enough content?
>  * would people feel happier doing "official" content there than on a
>    personal blog?
>  * will it just compete with the planet
>  * could get summaries of

As a user, I've never felt I was more likely to choose a piece of
software because its team had a blog, nor because of anything they were
saying on the blog.  Have you?

> call to action(tm):
>  * send this to the bzr list - danger of bikeshedding
>  * beuno may be able to help with design
>  * can do the script in parallel with getting it design
>  * or should we use eg Drupal?

What would Drupal get us that Launchpad wouldn't?  (Not a rhetorical
question.)

-Karl