History: Tiki Community 2021 Navigation Revamp
Preview of version: 87
What
Let's review, rethink, revamp and reorganize the navigation of
- Various Tiki community sites
- If you get "You do not have permission to view this page", ask an admin (such as Marc) to add you to Team Developers
- Presence on external sites (Ex.: Social Media presence)
- Friendly / supportive sites such as https://TikiForSmarties.com/, https://TikiTrackers.org, https://WikiSuite.org, https://PluginProblems.com, https://WysiwygProblems.com, https://SpreadsheetProblems.com, etc
- Others?
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)
- 13:00 UTC Thursdays starting 2021-06-10
Where
Who
- @Aris Bernotas
- Marc
- Gary (chibaguy)
- Torsten
- @Bernard Sfez / Tiki Specialist
- carsten.aevermann
- Please join the effort!
How
Doocracy
Examples to look at (including projects similar to us)
- Joomla https://www.joomla.org
- Their Header Top menu consists of sections we were talking about at TikiFest
- Their Header Middle says clearly where you are according to the top choice
- Their Header Bottom menu is a sub-menu
- WordPress https://wordpress.org
- You can find showcases easily
- Not overcrowded
- Drupal https://www.drupal.org
- Not overcrowded
- Archlinux https://archlinux.org
- Simple and effective
- Guardian https://www.theguardian.com/uk
- Has aggregated menu "More"
- Has editions to choose from
- MediaWiki
- Splits info between Set up and run vs Edit and use vs Develop and extend code vs Get help and contribute
- https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki
- Explains what makes it unique
- https://www.wix.com/
- Simple and not overcrowded
- Strong messages clearly separate from other content
- Illustrations shows what the product can do
- Short FAQ with ONLY positive answers that tell how good is the product
- No forums - means no support
- https://laravel.com/
- Simple and not overcrowded
- Little content with simple message
- A lot of space
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
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
- Since Aris pointed out some of the catchphrases that are being used, this one on the Community page is now stopping me: "The Tiki Community is a global network of developers, site operators, consultants and end users interested in the Tiki Wiki CMS Groupware. Currently tiki.org has over 25,000 registered users and over 300 developers at this site. " — That strikes me as quite over-stated. Although there are Tiki users (and, ok, the community) all over the world, the phrase "global network" implies a much stronger interconnectiveness that really exists. And the figures for registered users and developers are meaningless. By far, the majority of those are dead accounts. Let's dial back statements like that. Update: I edited it to tone it down, and fixed little things in the page, but it all could be revised/replaced.
- 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)
- Ex.: When Tiki Online Open Hours was discontinued, it should have been removed from the top menu.
- Documentation on lessons learned
- Be in a position to bring in a graphic designer to make it look great (which is another project)
Actions by our audiences
Is Tiki for me?
- Learn about what is Tiki?
- Does Tiki do what I need? ("Pre-sales" question, try demo)
- First impression/high-level vs detailed check list
- Demo request
- I want to hire someone to help me
- When is next event?
I use Tiki
- Register
- Report a bug with Tiki
- Ask for support with own Tiki
- Learn how a feature works
- Learn about the community / process / how to contribute
- Report an issue with infrastructure (can't login)
- Request/suggest a feature (including offer to pay)
I help Tiki become better
- Share information about Tiki software (new features, etc.)
- Share information about Tiki community/events/etc.
- Express a concern/opportunity in the community and suggest a change
- Operational
- Strategy/vision
- Contribute code
- Help others
- Improve docs
- Mark as outdated (text vs screenshot), propose deletion, add to archive, etc
- Vote on event date
- Participate to event
- Triage issues
- Cleaning data
Ideas / links about dealing with complex navigation
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
- 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)
- 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
- 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.