Archived Forum

 I've always found this site difficult to navigate, especially upon my first visits, and does not do the project justice, although I assume that it would be very difficult to change it at this stage (is it Drupal?).

There is so much great and valuable info in here which can so easily be overlooked and lost, so I have to agree.

I also think its not easy to navigate through all the excellent information in this site, however if you take some time you will find it.

K7da, maybe you can propose a structure to the developers to help them out.

I also have a site for my projects and i totally understand that its very difficult to organize everthing, specially when time is short and you want to spend it in your project and not in website management.

nevertheless, i love this site, has helped me a lot !!

Thankyou k7da, pauldreed, sergegsx for your thoughts, we also agree that organisation could be improved and have some ideas, it would be great to have a list of the main stumbling blocks that you have come across and any suggestions you may have for how to improve it.

I always find the Recent activity panel confusing - it clearly records when there has been a change to the page, but on navigating to that page, its not always easy to see what the change was.

Is there scope for confusion on the right hand panel which has Recent activity at the top, and  Recent comments at the bottom? Could change the titles at least, or try and consolidate where posting/comments are allowed (might overcome the recent few days problems of folk trying to document a build, but ending up creating new content).

On the forums, I not sure but it doesnt seem as though the last update / new topic always shows the latest date of change.

 Thankyou for your suggestions Andy, Yes I need to look into the recent activity log because I tried to integrate the comment feed into the page update feed but it did not quite work and then other things overtook so I did not get a chance to finish it.

a few more suggestions:

- do not allow comments on every page.  use the forum for discussions, then update the pages to which the discussions refer.  if a page is specific to a particular hardware/firmware/software version, then note this in the page then ensure that page does not disappear.  having comments on every page make the site *really* hard to follow.

- create a navigation hierarchy that is as simple as possible, but that will last at least a year or two of development.  ensure that this navigation tree is on every web page.

- create an api page for emoncms.  write this page before you write any code.  the api page should explain how to upload and download data to emoncms.  this defines how the system should behave, so it is the basis for unit tests, development, and documentation.  keep a separate api page for each major release of emoncms, so if someone is stuck using and older version of emoncms they still get the docs.  and anyone contemplating an upgrade can see exactly how the api has changed.

- more generally, create a design document for emoncms that describes the expected behavior for each major component of the system.

- create a page that has thumbnails of each emoncms visualization widget, linked to a description of how that widget is supposed to behave, how to install the widget, etc.  this should be a part of the emoncms design document.

- if there are plugins to emoncms, require that any plugin is self-documenting (a la perl or python modules, or even phpbb modules).  establish a simple but easily tested set of requirements so that anyone contributing knows exactly what is required before their plugin is accepted.

 Thanks for the suggestions powermeister, when I get some more time I will really have a go at this.