Redesign of Orxonox website

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beni
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Redesign of Orxonox website

Post by beni » Wed Sep 01, 2010 3:17 pm

So we were discussing this already a little in the IRC channel, but I want to shift this conversation to the forum.

We spent a lot of great time with the trac wiki as a homepage and developer platform. However the possibilities are limited and there are tons of tools out there that do a much better job.

Alone the wiki is really limited with trac and changing it would give us more possibilites to have better navigation and attachments etc.

Then the design is quite old as well and on laptops the planet at the top takes away too much space.

Also the doxygen plugin doesn't work well and we had a lot of trouble with the trac wiki. The connection to SVN and the tickets are hardly used anyway and there are tools out there that are much more useful in my opinion.

One example would be crucible (isn't free unfortunately), which is used for code reviewing. That'll be a cool tool.

So if we would decide on getting rid of trac, we should find other tools that incorporate the functionality (and hopefully more) than trac does.
If you have any suggestions, please post them so we can discuss it.

My idea would be, that we could put everything under one header so navigation is still easily possible.
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Re: Redesign of Orxonox website

Post by greenman » Wed Sep 01, 2010 7:49 pm

I'm completely open to this. However I used the connection to svn quiet often and wouldn't like to miss it.
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Re: Redesign of Orxonox website

Post by x3n » Wed Sep 01, 2010 11:23 pm

yeah i'd also like to keep the SVN connection on the site. thats really useful, also in the PPS if you want to show someone a piece of code and you don't want to navigate through the files with gedit or another crap editor. ;)

however i really dislike the trac wiki and thats probably also what started this discussion. the formatting is really basic and the available tools don't satisfy my needs. also we're constantly having trouble with trac, plugins, and css files because that seems to be vulnerable point in the system.

more than that trac is written in python, has its own database and even its own virtual filesystem (the wiki pages don't really exist in the filesystem, neither do the stylesheets and other stuff) - which makes it really a pain in the ass to adjust it to our needs.

i have quite some experience with websites, php scripts, mysql databses, and stuff and i never had big troubles with them and i could easily build websites based on several different scripts in the past, so in my opinion we don't need an all-inclusive system like trac. we need a suitable wiki, an SVN browser, and a ticketsystem (bugtracker anyone?). forum and doxygen will probably be external, but at least for the doxygen pages we could include the headers of the page. if we don't find a good alternative for some trac features (SVN) we could even keep trac running in the background and build the rest of the site around it. :)
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beni
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Re: Redesign of Orxonox website

Post by beni » Thu Sep 02, 2010 6:34 am

Well, I'm probably the one who likes trac the most of all of us ^^, so I don't want to lose any functionality if possible (unless it's useless).

What do you mean with the connection of SVN to trac? The browser? the timeline?
I really like the way you can look at diffs in trac, but I would prefer more functionality. My dream would be full integration into the wiki. Namely that you can refer to code excerpt from the wiki directly. Maybe even include code from the SVN into the Wiki. It would be great for the documentation or code reviews.

Bugtracker is a nice tool and even though our tickets are not all bugs, features and PPS projects can be included as tickets easily.

As we don't use the milestones anyway we probably won't need a replacement for that. However you know that I like this feature and would like to see it in the future, but I'm being realistic there ^^.

I also agree with x3n with the languages. I too have never trouble to work in an SQL, php, css system but this trac stuff with the plugins really is hard to maintain. So for better maintainability I would suggest something like that.
I think that my brother could do some redesigning as well. If we don't have to include it into trac it's again much easier to maintain and also for him more fun to design.
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x3n
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Re: Redesign of Orxonox website

Post by x3n » Thu Sep 02, 2010 10:15 am

I mean the SVN browser, yes, looking at code in different repositories without checking them out, looking at previous commits in the timeline and their diff. Of course I can do the same with my local SVN tool, but if I'm not on my own computer, for example in the PPS, it can be handy to have it online.

Integrate code in the wiki is useless. Why would you write a wiki page about a piece of code? And of course you can always add links in the wiki to anything, even if your code would be hosted on sourceforge you could add a link. Thats not a feature of trac. Oh and we never used the code reviews ever in three years.

And btw, there's a difference between a bugtracker (which should be public) and tickets. We don't have a bugtracker now, that's why I asked in my previous post if someone wants this.

So what do we do now? I don't think a redesign is urgent except for better usability on laptops. Let's first look at possible scripts. We have already proposed some wiki-systems in the IRC, however it's hard to tell if they satisfy our needs without using them. ;) The mentioned systems were: MediaWiki (damian uses this), DokuWiki (used on http://pixhawk.ethz.ch/), and Tiki Wiki (used by Ogre).
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Re: Redesign of Orxonox website

Post by beni » Fri Sep 03, 2010 7:32 am

Okay, the graphic design is probably not so important.

The most important thing is probably the wiki and I don't think that we have to go offline with the page for too long to set up the new environment. Most important thing is probably fixing the main page in light of the upcoming PPS course.

So first we should choose (maybe vote or discuss it at the ThinkTank?) the wiki, then fix the doxygen (temporarily a single page). After that we set up the wiki and repopulate it with the old wikipages. For this we have to find a good solution so we can filter out the old stuff but still benefit from old, good ideas. Maybe a new structure is also necessary.
Then we could make the effort to replace trac entirely. Bugtracker, ticket system and SVN connection (maybe http://www.websvn.info/) have to be replaced or included for a better workflow.

Ultimately I would like to improve the navigation among all these different tools and include consistency in the graphic design and a header so we can switch between different sites easily. Instead of a cluttered site I'd like a good presentation of everything. My brother may be interested to help with the design there again.

All the tools should be based on php and SQL, if possible.

So x3n already proposed a few wikis. I like the MediaWiki, but maybe another one is better suited for our purposes for reasons unclear to me yet. This page helps to compare all the different wiki sites.
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Re: Redesign of Orxonox website

Post by Mozork » Sun Sep 05, 2010 8:23 pm

I agree, trac definitely has its limits.
To me the most important feature of trac has been the SVN browser, to look at diffs and commits. Tickes are certainly useful, milestones could be useful if we used them more actively. The same goes for a bugtracker, while we don't need it at the moment I could imagine a time when it would be useful to have one.

One drawback of integrating too many different systems is, that each one of them has its own login so we would have to put some kind of system in place that you only have to login once and be logged in for all our different systems.

On the other hand a fresh start might help us to put our documentation up to date and devise a better structure for the website.

So I'm all for it, I know a little PHP, HTML and CSS, so if need be I could help as well. One thing that i find important is, that we have a running version up at all times, so I would suggest we develop it on the server and switch as soon as all the data is transferred and its fully functional.

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Re: Redesign of Orxonox website

Post by x3n » Sun Sep 05, 2010 11:31 pm

apparently it's possible to disable most of trac's features (including the wiki), so we could continue using trac for SVN and just replace the wiki.

@mozork: yes, the login could be a problem, but we can solve that if one system serves as the "main" script, while other scripts don't require login, but are included through the main script... at least in theory.

and yes, the page should stay online, but we can easily use a subdomain to develop the new website.


edit: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/9586 ... nd-for-svn
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Suggestions for a new design

Post by The Jo » Mon Sep 06, 2010 6:48 pm

I'm not happy how the orxonox site is structured at the moment and try to find how to make it better:

What was puzzeling were the two rows of tabs:
"Home, About, Screenshot, Download, Developement, Forum" and
"Wiki, Timeline, Roadmad, Browse Source, Doxygen, View Ticket, Search"

Sketch:
* www.orxonox.net:
Should be reserved for newbies. It should contain the following tabs: "Home, About, Screenshot, Download, Participate"

The "Participate" page should show several different ways how to join the orxonox project. There should be some links to a "Coding" page, "Modeling" page, "Story" page , and a "PPS" page and furthermore all possible ways how to communicate.

* code.orxonox.net:
-this is the orxonox site for developement

* model.orxonox.net:
-modeling tutorials
-"catalogue": for each model there should be a documentation and presentation (name, picture, other relevant data, how to add a model in a level)
-ticket system for models / textures

* story.orxonox.net:
Here the story developement should be carried out.

* pps.orxonox.net:
Everything relevant for PPS students.
-------------------------------------------------------
All in all: I think this site could benefit from a clear structure.
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Re: Suggestions for a new design

Post by greenman » Mon Sep 06, 2010 7:28 pm

thanks for your input
i agree that the page has some structural problems and like your approach of dividing the page into several subdomains.

we are currently "evaluating" some wiki/ticket/etc. systems we can use instead of trac and could probably very well embed a new structure at this point
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Re: Redesign of Orxonox website

Post by greenman » Mon Sep 06, 2010 7:32 pm

it is no problem to develop the new site while still running the old one and i think we will definitely do this

x3n, did you post this link to say that there might be no better svn webbrowser than trac or did i take this wrong?
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Re: Redesign of Orxonox website

Post by x3n » Mon Sep 06, 2010 11:33 pm

Well yes, according to this link trac may be the best system, but it also lists quite a few other systems, so I posted it because it's also a nice overview.
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Re: Suggestions for a new design

Post by x3n » Mon Sep 06, 2010 11:43 pm

hi jo,

thanks for your suggestions. maybe you want to participate in our ongoing discussion about re-designing the page, which you can find here: http://forum.orxonox.net/viewtopic.php?f=27&t=475

oh and actually the second navigation row should only be visible if you click on the "Development" tab, but the original layout didn't survive the updates of the system. over time we got used to it. ;)

about your suggestion: I think sub-domains aren't the best way for this. it's a little counter-intuitive as sub-domains are usually used for completely separated websites. I'd rather suggest to use http://www.orxonox.net/code, /content, etc. But of course that's currently not possible, because the trac-wiki doesn't support sub-directories. That's a pitty and also one of the main reasons why we're looking for a better system (see the link above).

As far as I know you have some experience with wiki-systems, so your opinion would be highly appreciated. :)
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Re: Redesign of Orxonox website

Post by Mozork » Tue Sep 07, 2010 8:08 am

I looked at some of the other systems and it seems that Trac really is the best (non commercial) system regarding SVN. WebSVN doesn't look bad either, though.

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Re: Suggestions for a new design

Post by greenman » Tue Sep 07, 2010 6:12 pm

actually using "subdirectories" should be possible by configuring apache appropriately. We would have to use several copies of trac though. Don't think this is feasible
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