reworking our themes

[Matthew East]

Hi,

On Fri, Aug 8, 2008 at 2:45 PM, Phil Bull <philbull at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Fri, 2008-08-08 at 08:05 +0100, Matthew East wrote:
>> I've made a start on the theming for the "official" documents by
>> tweaking the xsl and css in our repository, and have come up with this
>> - http://doc.ubuntu.com/~mdke/test/serverguide/C/index.html
>>
>> Any comments?
>
> Looks great! The only suggestion I have is to change the font to Verdana
> or Arial for readability and aesthetic reasons [1].

Yeah. I agree with Dougie that Ubuntu sites should be consistent so
I'll look at tidying up the fonts and linking a bit later.

>> The "todo" items are to add the word "documentation" to the header
>> logo, and to figure out how to arrange the tabs currently in use on
>> help.ubuntu.com (or maybe abandon them for a different method/style of
>> site navigation.
>
> A more scalable navigation method would be to use a drop-down menu
> (either a form element or a pretty JavaScript one). It could be
> populated from an external JavaScript file, so we wouldn't have to
> rebuild the whole site after each release.

That would save a lot of effort, yeah. Did you have ideas about how to
structure something like that? We could think about a different way to
deal with versions as well; instead of having tabs for each version of
Ubuntu as we do currently, we could show the latest version by default
and provide a link to older versions if required (like Gnome do,
http://library.gnome.org/users/, although not necessarily with the
same implementation). That would free us up to do more helpful things
with the site navigation.

> We could put other stuff in
> there too, like "Ubuntu Server", "Mobile Edition" and "Kubuntu".

Sure.

> Also, would it be possible to drop a table of contents into a sidebar or
> similar? This would make it much easier for users to find documentation.

Yes, it's no problem to include tables of contents in principle,
although I'm not sure there is much space currently. I would probably
prefer to have a breadcrumb above the page which shows whereabouts in
a document a user is, and provides a link back to home and the
document index page.

-- 
Matthew East
http://www.mdke.org
gnupg pub 1024D/0E6B06FF