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Hi happy person,

PERSONALLY and you know I am hesitant to speak often, maybe the 
indications indicate the contrary, but I am rather hesitant to speak also 
on IRC.

Personally I think the presentation of the information -- I called it 
"empty slogans.." for a moment. It is the Dropbox style, the new style of 
content presentation that is meant to draw people in..... by not giving 
any information.

Trust me, been there, done that. I was once on a board for my study (just 
a university course) and I did just that. In the end I reverted the whole 
thing and wrote something else in like minutes, and it was better than 
the message I had concocted before. People gave some feedback and I was 
like "what the hell, this is true, this makes no sense what I've been 
doing".

It was just a course with about 20 members for a project and I was 
responsible for the communication. And the presentation, while another 
team member turned it into a Flash presentation.

The presentation of the information I mean.

If I just look at the new site (I hope it is kubwp.kubuntu.co.uk) I just 
see many headers that are slogans for a commercial and they do not provide 
any information. By contrast the old site (www.kubuntu.org) was ugly but 
informative.

This is a new style of presenting that is not helpful. You see it all 
around. It is supposed to draw people in but it frustrates because you 
don't see anything and the impression is that you need to get in anyway in 
order to know what it is about. So you are getting into a mindset, or you 
get into a mindset where you just jump onboard, you just jump ship, you 
jump onboard because that is the only way to get the information you want. 
It looks all fancy and now you have to try it to know what it is really 
like. Instead of having the information give you that info. Instead of the 
presentation providing you with that information.

So it does draw people in but only if they feel they have no other choice 
anyway. Ie. Dropbox is ubiquitous. Most people don't know an alternative. 
That is the setting in which it 'works'. Just a little something. A little 
101. A technical person wants the opposite of that, and anyone or everyone 
is at least slightly technical. You want to know what it does and why it 
works.

For example, this text that another person referenced:

"Amarok, Kubuntu’s default music player, has an intuitive and friendly 
interface."

Who gets to decide whether it is intuitive and friendly? Why should anyone 
believe you on your word? It comes across as offensive to any viewer 
whether they realize it or not, that another person is going to determine 
his or experience. It is not an objective statement. It is a personal 
experience of the developers, or an opinion about that.

Something like "Was built to be intuitive and friendly" comes a lot closer 
to that mark.

But ideally you just let the customer decide whether the product is any 
good, you don't tell the customer that the product is very good. Not 
in terms of power words, qualitative words. You supply the customer with 
information that he/she can base a well-weighed (or enthusiastic) choice 
upon.

So what is missing is the "why"? Why is the interface intuitive and 
friendly? THAT is where INFORMATION lies. Personally, for example, I 
pretty much hate Amarok, but I love Clementine, which is a fork.

Can hardly try it here, I am in Gnome. I'd have to download a bunch of 
stuff. Later.

Lol but I already have Clementine installed, just couldn't live without it 
:P. (I am just doing rounds along various installs, or distribution, next 
up will probably be to install a fresh 15.04 Kubuntu again to see if 
anything is different.

So installing Amarok wouldn't take long. But it is not very important I 
guess now.)

You see, personally, as a regular user but also as a knowledgeable or 
technical person, I always want to know why people are making certain 
challengeable statements.

I never take someone on his word, because if his word were true, he'd 
supply me with information that I can base my own choice or my own 
appraisal on.

So the form of presentation gives rise to the sentiment of knowing what a 
person is intending with that presentation. And it determines the quality.

For example "Browse images with a beautiful interface"

"We have an image viewer that might surprise you." <-- is a lot more 
intriguing, a lot less of a lie.

"Seamlessly open documents" --> "Okular does it all, whenever you have a 
document." <-- is already a lot more intriguing and more information as 
well (because "open documents" can also refer to e.g. LibreOffice, but 
clearly that is not meant, so while Okular itself does not provide much 
information (as a word) "does it all" mentions or refers to a thing that 
is regularly done with documents (which is to view them).)

"Surf the Internet with Firefox" --> "Firefox is included by default, but 
there is a lot more."

And that is just staying with the current format, which would not even be 
my choice probably.

You can make all of these messages a lot more intriguing and inviting 
without changing anything else.

Just my 2 cents for now.


ps. I am a WordPress hacker myself. Been on their hackers mailinglist for 
almost a year now though, that much I can say for myself. I have not much 
experience lately ie. I haven't even tried version 4 yet because it was 
merely a minor update that broke things and introduced ugliness that was 
not important to introduce.

But on the topic of multi-language:

**The default plugin for WP is WPML but they went commercial. The free 
version is now very limited (or was) e.g. --- not free, the cheap version, 
is very limited. the 15 dollar version. The 70 dollar version is what they 
were before. When they were still free. Ie. the cheap version doesn't have 
any widgets. Bummer. You need a widget to select the language.

Can't live without that, can we?

So I still have a copy of the older version somewhere.

I believe it is version 2.0.4.1 it is the latest free version I have it 
patched (roughly) because it stopped working or started not working 
anymore correctly since WP 3.4 or something. I am not sure about its 
state. I patched it also (actually an older version, like 1.8.1.2) to 
include a feature what was later introduced by default. Let me just check 
if those changes are there.....

It seems the first part of the patch is no longer needed in 2.0.4.1. It 
was about using /en/ prefixes in urls. For the default language too, ie. 
by default it would do /url-to-post-or-page/ for the default language but 
/nl/url-to-post-or-page/ for the secondary languages. I wanted everything 
behind a language link.

There are three settings for:

   switch($this->settings['language_negotiation_type']){ (init, line 307 in 
sitepress.class.php)

The first (1) is /en/ in language url, (2) is en.domain.org in subdomain, 
(3) and the default is ?lang= in url.

It used to have a check against ->get_default_language() to disable the 
language parsing in the url for the default language. Or at least the 
redirection, the parsing was already done.

Next up were checks in convert_url() and permalink_filter(), 
category_permalink_filter() and tax_permalink_filter(). It seems I did 
patch everything and quickfix an issue where the filters were called twice 
(in recent versions of WP) without knowing really what the change was and 
why.

It should work though, I shall attempt an upgrade on an old site...

It works although my site is mostly broken (in terms of the customized 
categories I had. But everything that is not customized just works:

http://1st.xenhideout.nl/nl/2010/09/arrogantie/

You can see how the url is given as /nl and /en and there is a language 
switcher inside every post. The rest of the site is defunct still, I am 
trying to fix it but not working very well yet. There was more wrong than 
I thought, for some reason? It was just an experiment in dealing with 
"series". The idea of the site was to have content organised in series, 
etc.

Just some primitive way of dealing with that, I guess. It's 5 years ago.

Almost. Anyway the database server was currently down for it.

Check it out if you like, it is a solution for having multi-language.

((I have it almost done now, at least the language selector CSS for the 
widget works again)). It is still using WP 3.4.1. Who knows what will 
break when I upgrade :P)).

Regards..



On Tue, 7 Apr 2015, Ovidiu-Florin BOGDAN wrote:

> Hello happy people,
>
> The new Kubuntu site is pretty much ready for delivery.
> I'm still waiting for some feedback from Rick, but mostly I believe it's ready.
>
> Now come and prove me wrong! (please don't :P)
>
> Please take a look over the site and give me feedback on everything.
> There are 2 major issues that I'm working on: Feature page navigation 
broken on firefox, and the team page.
> Please add stuff to the *Kubuntu Promotion* Trello board in the *Feedback* list. If you don't have access to it, ask here.
> For content propositions, please set up a Document and add it as an attachment. Please name it apropriately.
>
> We've decided not to ship multilingual for now, due to some limitations of WordPress. I'll provide more details if needed.
>
> I'm keeping my fingers crossed.
>
> Regards,--
> *Ovidiu-Florin BOGDAN*
> GeekAliens.com[1]
> Kubuntu România
>
> --------
> [1] http://ovidiu.geekaliens.com
>