new wiki theme

[Phil Bull]

Hi Matt,

On Sun, 2008-08-31 at 10:59 +0100, Matthew East wrote:
> Over the last few days I've been working on a new theme for the Help
> wiki. It's coming along ok, there is still a bit of work to do on it.
> However it's at a stage where some feedback would be great.
> 
> The way I've approached it is to keep everything as simple and clean
> as possible, especially for users who aren't logged in and will just
> be reading the documentation. Then when you log in, you get an edit
> toolbar at the bottom of the screen which follows you as you scroll up
> and down the page.
> 
> Screenshots:
> 
> Non-logged in users: http://doc.ubuntu.com/~mdke/wikitheme/logged_out.png
> The footer looks like this: http://doc.ubuntu.com/~mdke/wikitheme/footer.png
> Logged in users: http://doc.ubuntu.com/~mdke/wikitheme/logged_in.png

They look great, simple and uncluttered.

> Any general comments? In particular, I'm currently racking my brains
> to figure out how to integrate the two areas of help.ubuntu.com
> (official documentation and community documentation). The answer may
> of course be to have some tabs at the top, or even better we may find
> a way to include the official documents in the wiki itself so that we
> can scrap the distinction...

Rather than merging the official and community documentation, why not
just have a front page and search mechanism common to both? This front
page would be editable on the wiki (perhaps only by trusted users?) to
allow quick updating when wiki content changes, and would include
well-organised links to both the official and community docs. It would
be a sort of hybrid of the existing official docs' table of contents and
the wiki's FrontPage. Here's an ugly mockup [1].

In this scheme, the official and community docs would be stored where
they are now. Users would be unaware of the distinction, apart from the
slightly different URLs, the absence/presence of an Edit button, and
some text in the theme denoting what type of document is being viewed
[2] [3].

With the appropriate search mechanism (perhaps Google Custom Search) we
could weight the search results appropriately too.

Thanks,

Phil

[1] - https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Philbull/FP
[2] - http://philbull.googlepages.com/logged_out_community.png
[3] - http://philbull.googlepages.com/logged_out_offic.png

-- 
Phil Bull
https://launchpad.net/people/philbull