reworking our themes

[Dougie Richardson]

> > 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.

Sounds fine as long as we have both current and LTS.

> 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.

Maybe, given the extra functionality we seem to be seeking, simple HTML for
our DocBook is no longer as scalable. There are plenty of open source CMS
systems available that can import directly from  XML and in fact, I know
that at least one of them has a DocBook importer and revision control. Once
configured by the web team, we would also no longer require their assistance
in uploads and more importantly be able to push important updates much
faster than the current release cycle.

I would have thought it possible to integrate it with the OpenID system used
by Launchpad too.

Just a thought.

Cheers,

Dougie