Archives: 1
New Main Page
I would like to improve our Main Page, and properly implement Fritzophrenic's Featured Tips.
I have started with some rough ideas at Proposed Main Page. When reasonably ready, I'll invite comments on vim-l.
I'm pretty sure we will never have more than sporadic news, and will never frequently update the main page (monthly would be a lot). So I think we should have fairly modest aims (for example, remove the news, and anticipate that the Featured Tips won't be updated more than, say, 10 times a year, and design the Main Page accordingly).
My ideas for the Main Page include:
- This is a Vim Tips wiki, so the main page should list lots of Vim Tips.
- Make the main page much shorter and simpler, with links to other stuff.
- It should emphasise what a reader can do (search, browse, featured tips).
- It should only show news when there really is news.
- We need a better "how to" for people who might want to edit (a page with a link from Main).
- The "Submit a Tip" and "Create page" stuff should be on another page with more explanation of what a contributor should do before posting random thoughts as a new tip.
- The long "Community discussions" and "Latest from vim.org" might be on another page, with a link from Main.
I've had a quick look at a few other wikis to see how other people do things. The first of the following is a giant wiki which we should not try to emulate, but it has some nice ideas. Have a look at these (and others) and we can start formulating what we'd like to do here.
Some other wikis
- Too big and feature-rich for us, but an interesting guide.
- Nice TOC (if we could ever produce something similar).
- Beautifully simple; could be useful if had links to decent follow-up pages.
- The Did you know? section at the bottom would be good. Each point might be an interesting concept with a link to a tip (if we had sufficient tips in good shape). Similar to Featured Tips but focusing on simple facts.
--JohnBeckett 08:48, 9 January 2008 (UTC)
Article ranking feature
If you switch to the new slate or smoke skin, you'll see an article rating feature on each page. The top rated articles are shown in a box at the top. Angela talk 18:38, 5 June 2007 (UTC)
- The above comment is archived, but I'm keeping a copy here because of its potential to improve the Main Page. However, my feeling is that it will be many months before we have any useful "top rated articles", and I don't intend promoting this concept at the moment. --JohnBeckett 08:08, 7 January 2008 (UTC)