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Date: Mon, 16 Jan 2012 15:49:38 +0100
From: Benedikt Ritter <bene@systemoutprintln.de>
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Subject: [ALL] suggestion for improvement: Unify homepage layout for all
 commons
 subprojects
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Hi,

looking at the different commons project pages, it occurs to me, that 
all pages use a slightly different layout. For example comparing Lang, 
BeanUtils and Collections with one another the first thing are the page 
titles:

- Home
- BeanUtils - Commons
- Collections - Home

If I were to rate this titles, I would say that "BeanUtils - Commons" is 
the best one, followed by "Collections - Home". "Home" from Lang's 
project page is clearly the worst page title I can think of.

Looking at the content area, there is not much to complain about. All 
three content areas are structured nearly the same way (although IMHO 
BeanUtils content area is a bit overloaded with release informations).

When it comes to the sidebar, things get completely inconsistent.
First of all: Why doesn't Lang's homepage has a link so ApacheCon?
Why does BeanUtils have a Documentation are and a Project Documentation 
area?
Where do I get all the informations about developing BeanUtils from (as 
Lang and Collections have a distinct development area)?
Why does Lang's ASF area have more links than the ones of the others?
Why do the release history pages of all three projects look so 
completely different?

In addition to that, I think that one thing is really missing on all of 
the three above mentioned pages: There is no road map for future 
releases! How can I know if I should wait for the next Collections 
release, that provides generics or better start my new project using the 
latest release? Maybe it will be out next week, maybe I have to wait one 
year. I don't know... There really has to be a road map, so that the 
users know when they can expect the next release and what they can 
expect from it.

I guess, I have made my point clear, and I bet that looking at other 
commons project pages would result in finding even more layout variants.
I don't want to study the page layout all over again, when I browse 
through the different project pages. I want everything to be at the same 
place (as far as possible). So I propose to unify all page layouts. This 
post is not supposed to present the perfect layout, but rather be a 
discussion starter on how such a layout could look like (if you guys 
think that a unified layout is needed at all...).

Regards
Benedikt


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