Puppy Linux Discussion Forum

[Lobster]

New ideas for website welcome
New blogs available
http://www.puppylinux.org/

more moderator positions available
Are you a PHP coder?
great way of learning about Puppy and joining 'Bob the builder'
http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=3IWKhYQarJU
Yes We Can
please leave a message on this thread if interested

Plans so far:

* Change colour scheme to light orange to match Zigberts scheme for Puppy 4.2
* Better wiki indexing page
* Shorter URL links to web pages

[DialupDude]

Speaking of nude puppies.
http://www.geocities.com/xoloit/home1.htm

[raffy]

The current people with roles at puppylinux.org are:

Translators

nyu, hairywill, BillWho, caka, vk, slapshot, tombh, oli, Puppyluvr, alexthedragon, cecc2, urbansoul, craftybytes, AC

Editors

WhoDo, tronkel, J_Rey, playdayz, LOF, Irihapeti, aitch, SunBurnt, jhecht, pakt, ttuuxxx, cb88, prehistoric, disciple, darreljon

Admins

WhoDo, hairywill, lobster, oli, prit, raffy

So there are already a good number of people with roles. Probably, let's first invite suggestions about what should be changed in the current website.

[darrelljon]

Here is a alpha version of an unofficial site I made.

[Caneri]

Hi darrelljon,

Hey that's a good looking web page.

Eric

[raffy]

Yes, nice, simple and functional. It even displays 3 columns well in 800x600 resolution.

Only problem in 800 width is the banner - have a look.

I guess darreljon needs higher admin privilege to play with the site's looks (Will check on that). Meantime, let's hear other people's views.

[Flash]

It looks nice to me, at 1024 x 768 display resolution, but I take issue with the info that Puppy 4 is only for newer processors. The latest Puppy (4.1.1) runs fine on my old Pentium 3.

[raffy]

darreljon's access at the site has been upgraded, so let's wait for his suggestions.

[darrelljon]

Okay I've added a few features to my own site but its still in alpha. I fixed the top menu on 640x480 hopefully and added a nice button to download the latest version (which doesn't work in Opera!) and a Google Search of PuppyLinux.org.

At PuppyLinux.org I've added Wiki categories "Getting", "Installation" and "Connecting to the Internet". I know these are in the Manual but beginners might like them in the Wiki (or users might like the option to edit them). Beginners instructions like these should be the most accessible things on the site. Some of the WiKi categories seem to have a prominence they didn't get in the old wikka wikki. Puppy 1 (yes really!), Old Wikka Wiki and Development for example should take lower positions compared to basics for beginners like downloading, booting, installing, connecting to the internet etc.

Some things I think could be improved. Localization flags, for example - once I've left the start page, these don't seem necessary. Why would I suddenly want to be one-click away from the Chinese localization (rather than say one-click away from the English forum) while I'm reading the blog for example?

Google translate gadget. Non-English speakers might not understand "translate" or "Select Language". Its also been conceded that a computer translation is inferior to a human localization. If a non-English speaker googles for Puppy Linux they will get the opportunity to computer-translate the page from the search results. Doing it from the search results is a option they are probably more familiar with. So I think the Google translate gadget adds clutter and duplicates localization pages in an inferior way.

Professional sites can detect the country I'm accessing it from and then direct to the localization. How difficult is this to do for Puppy (I imagine quite difficult) and relegate the localization links to obscurity? OpenSuse.org does this I think.

Although I use a home button on my own alpha website, being able to click on a big title or the site logo to get to the homepage is preferable. Unfortunately, the site logo on PuppyLinux.org can't be clicked on. It also takes up a lot of screen space for something that cannot be clicked on.

Greater use could be made of the top level menu - currently only "Home, Downloads, Manual, Wiki, Community". Everything else is currently minimum two clicks away rather than just one-click away. Among the things that could be added I think maybe Chat (the IRC channel), Blog (Community blogs), Forum, maybe World Map (the Frappr map), maybe even Facebook group?

Ultimately PuppyLinux.org should be competing with Mandriva.com, OpenSuse.org and FedoraProject.org for a usable, accessible, attractive website which you shouldn't need a massive amount of bandwidth limits to manage.

[raffy]

One click on the front page (for accessing a desired page) is a great idea.

For available localization*, perhaps one page can be dedicated to this, containing the links to the available translations as well as a how-to about the google technique you described.

Another link could be added, that of the Puppy desktop project c/o technosaurus. (I've suggested that he uses desktop.puppylinux.org for this. Right now it is at pupweb.org/desktop.)

Thanks for working on this, darrelljon.

------------------------
* In the meantime that auto language detection is being worked on, that is.

[HairyWill]

A lot of this makes sense to me.
It has been a learning process working out which parts of the site are most important and trying to make these accessible to as many people as possible. It is possible to be a lot more economical with the screen space.

I do like the roles and infrastructure provided by drupal. Tom did a good job of defining different classes of user and their access rights.

Darrelljon have you ever done any php or other server side scripting?

[darrelljon]

I don't have PHP or server side scripting skills and haven't used Drupal until the Puppy website. I'm an enthusiastic amateur with an eye for usability.

I added a Forum link at the top of PuppyLinux.org but it might be a bit wrong at the moment (it appears lower down when the window isn't wide enough).

[raffy]

@ darrelljon: No problem if you have no PHP skill (yet). The site's looks are controlled by the theme files (most likely in /themes/puppy).

You could have renamed the "Community" with "Forum" as the URL goes to the same place.

@all: After we've had a number of feedback about darrelljon's design, we can start implementing it at puppylinux.org.

[HairyWill]

[darrelljon]

Thanks guys.
There are 3 reasons I link to WikiBooks on my unofficial site.
1 WikiBooks has more users than the Puppy website
2 It uses MediaWiki
3 Content is GFDL