On 2012-12-18, at 21:32, Chris Cunnington <smalltalktelevision@gmail.com> wrote:

I've redesigned squeak.org and I think all the problems are solved. The problems were a doubling menu bar; an extraneous navbar; Altitude components that didn't jibe with the Bootstrap layout; and, 24-char tokens instead of regular looking URIs (i.e. /community or /blogs).

The way the Altitude's examples are laid out uses composition and a class that acts as a frame with a navbar. The frame allows other classes/components to be swapped out of an ivar called #current with the navbar.

I did away with that and replaced composition with inheritance. Now there is an abstract superclass (i.e. SQAbstractSuperclass) and every page with content is a subclass with a #renderConentOn: method. The navbar supplied by Bootstrap is created by the abstract superclass. All links are hyperlinks (i.e. all "html a href:" and no "html a navigate:", "html a callback:", or "html a linkTo:").

So the superclass creates the menu. All the content classes have #renderContentOn:. The only remaining thing is to list all the tokens you'll use for URIs in SQSqueakApplication>>#initializeLocator.

initializeLocator
   locator
       at: ALPath root
       put: SQHomePage new asResource.
   locator at: ALPath / 'license'
       put: SQLicensePage new asResource.
   locator at: ALPath / 'blogs'
       put: SQBlogsPage new asResource.
   locator at: ALPath / 'docs'
       put: SQDocumentationPage new asResource.
   locator at: ALPath / 'community'
       put: SQMailingListsPage new asResource.
   locator at: ALPath / 'devlinks'
       put: SQDeveloperLinksPage new asResource.
   locator at: ALPath / 'projects'
       put: SQProjectLinksPage new asResource.

The result is a website using standard looking URIs that is dead easy to make. It won't win any prizes, but it fits the spec and is simple as a pin. Altitude is nothing of not versatile. There are color, positioning, etc. details so it'll be a few days before I deploy the new version.

Chris

Sounds good. In addition:

IMHO we should try to match the existing URLs unless the new structure is too different in places.

This would mean e.g. the community page should live at /Community not /community, documentation at /Documentation not /docs etc. External deep links would continue to work, which I generally consider a Good Thing.

Alternatively, we could add redirects from the old locations to their new home.

And it would be a good idea to monitor the error log to find out about old URLs in use. Altitude does create access logs and error logs, I assume? Or would that be handled by Apache?

Also, the error page should be customized, currently it is not too helpful:

http://box3.squeak.org:8624/error

If it instead displayed a site map (list of all major pages), people arriving from dead URLs could still quickly jump to where they would want to go. Also, it would be cool to have a nice graphic, e.g.:

                             

(if you want to use that, we need to give attribution to AMENAZAGFX, because I based it on http://www.officialpsds.com/Hole-in-Paper-3-PSD50497.html)

- Bert -