I had some spare time the other day, and as I haven’t made too many contributions to FreeBSD lately, so I thought it might be a good idea to do something to improve our FreeBSD.org web page.
I was thinking about the navigation of the homepage of the FreeBSD Project, and found out that it pretty much sucks. Although we have a lot of links in there, some pretty important pages are not linked, are difficult to find, or are simply hidden very well in secondary web pages. The navigation wasn’t very straight-forward.
It looks like most of the modern web sites resolve issues with navigation by adding a drop-down menus, which are easy to use, look pretty and are user friendly; Thus I looked around the web about how to implement those and found out that it should be possible to implement it in pure CSS.
I have read a few howtos and decided to try it out for FreeBSD.org web site. The result was pretty impressive (it works in all modern browsers, including Firefox 2.x+, Opera 9.5+, IE7+, Chrome and Safari) and as I got a good feedback from www@/doc@ team, I have yesterday commited a prototype of this implementation. As as result, you can now navigate through drop-down menus at the www.FreeBSD.org web site to reach some important pages you may have not even known about.
I hope that this change will improve the current situation around the navigation and that you will like it 😉
Not work on page http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/cvsweb.cgi/, and http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/query-pr-summary.cgi.
It also works with enabled noscript firefox addon. It very good, thanks.
But where will it be integrated into localized pages? Russian isn’t updated yet.
I will fix that, thanks for letting me know. The CGI scripts use different files to generate their styles.
Well that’s up to the localization teams. They need to grab the relevant parts of the HTML of the menu, CSS part is already being included globally. It isn’t very much work so I suppose once they notice they need to integrate it, they surely will do so soon.
architecture handbook should also be in the documentation drop down.
Hey Daniel:
The drop-down menus on FreeBSD site look very nice.
I was wondering if you guys considered moving the entire site to ‘Drupal’. Drupal is a highly configurable content management framework with lots of modules to bring in functionality like forums, projects, tracker etc.
With a single ‘node’ abstraction’ is very easy to integrate all the functionality that a community site like FreeBSD would need.
An additional benefit would be that we don’t have to worry about a seemingly disjoint activity/ like ‘adding a forum’ or ‘supporting tweets’ or frontend to the multiple source code management systems etc.
What are your thoughts ?
thanks
Saifi.