Loading...
 
Skip to main content

History: Tiki Community 2021 Navigation Revamp

Preview of version: 80

What

Let's review, rethink, revamp and reorganize the navigation of


There are hundreds of thousands of pieces of information (wiki pages, forums posts, comments, tracker items, commits, etc.) related to the Tiki software and the community. There are hundreds and hundreds of URLs in the various home pages, menus or gateway pages. Stuff has been added for 15+ years and it's quite confusing. Let's re-organize!

Some challenges expressed here: https://arilect.com/tiki-read_article.php?articleId=31
Some areas and steps proposed here: 5 Simple Areas and Steps To Improve Tiki.org Navigation in June 2021...

When

  • Weekly meetings until it is done (Likely 4 to 8 weeks, 2 hours per meeting)


Where

Live

Who

How

Doocracy

Examples to look at (including projects similar to us)

Topics (unordered)

  • Determine types of users and determine objectives of each -> Tiki Community Audience and Objectives
  • Determine the Tiki site usage as it impact the navigation layout and content. (marketing usage impose less drawers than technical usage)
    • Technical (dev, doc, themes, ...)
    • Marketing (tiki, ...)
    • Community (informal, news, support, ...)
  • Where to place "other" navigation tools (edit, social network, top links, etc) that are impacting navigation clarity and the message.
    Tiki
    Tiki

    Community
    Community
  • Look at stats / data
  • Inventory of content
    • For gaps: Add placeholder and add as tasks on Community items (Navigation revamp should not wait)
  • Rethink and agree on where content should be
  • Decide on what should be in consistent navigation (ex.: common footer) vs specific to a sub-domain.
    • Content on all pages: Register, Search, etc.
  • Review all sites to determine if some need to be upgraded.
  • Restructure navigation

Principles (unordered)

  • Mobile first
  • Dogfood
  • Keep in mind technical debt
  • We don't break URLs. Put a redirect or Page Alias
    • Don't commit to ongoing work / updates (which makes us look bad if not done). Write timeless content.
  • Do not duplicate information. Decide where it goes and add redirects or PluginInclude
  • Stay in our scope: Some people seem to have taken to defining the world on our wiki pages. That is fair game on user pages, but otherwise, it should be elsewhere (Wikipedia exists!)
  • Understand the history of why things were done a certain way. We can change of course, but try to avoid mistakes and pain of the past. Ex.:
    • Projects started by well-meaning people who then disappeared and left a mess, which impacted the community and added work on existing community (Jonny and Marc have dozens of example of cleaning up messes over the years)
    • Too many times, well-meaning marketing/branding/communication/strategy specialists will get involved and come to the conclusion that we need a new logo, or a new name or a new branding. But they never offer an implementation plan. How will such a transition happen? Who will do it? When? And why would this action have more impact than other things we can do? They focus on "easy" and "visible" things. Latest example is here: Branding and Marketing Creative Brief 2016 and nothing materialized. Now, let's be honest: If the logo had changed, would Tiki really be different today? However, what would have been useful and had an impact is if the current project (re-organize the information architecture so community members can more easily participate) had been done years ago. Or even make a nicer one pager in HTML as a gateway to the different sites, like https://kolab.org/
    • For whatever reason, it was decided to spin off a new Tiki at info.tiki.org to replace tiki.org as main information site. Years later, it was decided to merge back in. Each transition caused a lot of work, and broken URLs. And multi-domain perspectives caused all kinds of issues.
  • Try to think of ways to get more and different people involved and resist the tentation to add yet more work on the shoulders of the people that do the most
  • Be data-driven
  • Truth. Please see section about truth here: https://wikisuite.org/Branding-Guidelines
  • Discuss information architecture approach: Lead by audience or Data type?
    • Data type: All forums on one site
    • Audience: Everything related to developers is on dev.tiki.org, so dev forum goes there.
  • Do we present from the angle of features or solutions or use cases or audiences or?
  • Most decisions to keep or remove will be unambiguous. In case of doubt, keep or remove?
  • Decide if / how we talk about the alternatives. Bernard and Marc have different points of view on this and it would be nice for everyone on the team to express their point of view. Even better some opinions from relevant experts in the field (product marketers)

Expected outcome

  • A major revamp of the navigation which works for target audiences
  • A list of high priority bugs and issues tracked on dev.tiki.org and can be taken on by different people. Ex.: Fabio volunteered for this. This list needs a clean-up: Community items. Types include:
    • Bugs in features
    • Missing or incomplete features
    • Content need major work. Ex.:
      • We need 40 screenshots for an overview of Tiki
    • We should add/change things in how our community works. Ex.:
      • We need a better Docker strategy for new devs
  • Some conventions (ex.: Only show info for supported versions, thus 18.x LTS+)
  • How to keep this clean enough? (ex.: A review once per year)
  • Documentation on lessons learned
  • Be in a position to bring in a graphic designer to make it look great (which is another project)

Technology we can leverage

  • Mega Menus (Would require help from Andon, and that all sites be upgrades to recent versions)
  • Federated Search

Out of scope

  1. While the theme and visual aspects should also be revamped, this will be a distinct project with a graphic designer (and current project is a pre-requisite anyways)
  2. Decision about and implementation of a chat system for the Tiki community to replace #tikiwiki on Freenode. One scenario is to replicate the wikisuite.chat experiment on tiki.org so all users registered on tiki.org would seamlessly be in chat rooms on chat.tiki.org
  3. Dedicated demo sites (which are more like show.tiki.org than demo.tiki.org) where each user can experiment for a while and demos are not messed up by random people.

History

Information Version
Marc Laporte 84
View
Marc Laporte 83
View
Carsten Aevermann 82
View
Marc Laporte 81
View
Aris Bernotas 80
View
Aris Bernotas 79
View
Bernard Sfez / Tiki Specialist 78
View
Bernard Sfez / Tiki Specialist 77
View
Aris Bernotas 76
View
Aris Bernotas 75
View
Aris Bernotas 74
View
Marc Laporte 73
View
Marc Laporte 72
View
Marc Laporte 71
View
Marc Laporte aris002 Has been added to the following group: Team Developers 70
View
Marc Laporte 69
View
Aris Bernotas 68
View
Aris Bernotas 67
View
Aris Bernotas 66
View
Marc Laporte 65
View
Marc Laporte 64
View
Marc Laporte 63
View
Marc Laporte 62
View
Marc Laporte 61
View
Marc Laporte 60
View