Restructuring techbase and userbase

[Cornelius Schumacher]

On Saturday 03 January 2009 16:17:43 Stephen Kelly wrote:
>
> I'm proposing some changes to how pages are organized and structured on
> techbase and userbase.

Thanks for moving forward with this discussion. There definitely is a need for 
some better organization.

> It's not entirely clear where such discussion belongs. See
> http://techbase.kde.org/Projects/Restructuring_techbase_and_userbase to
> catch up.

That itself shows, that we need better structure ;-)

> Currently some teams have pages which live below the Projects/ page, like
> http://techbase.kde.org/Projects/Games, and particular games live a few
> levels below that:
> http://techbase.kde.org/Projects/Games/Arcade_Games/KGoldrunner.
>
> I don't think there's any need for all those subpages. I propose moving
> such pages to http://techbase.kde.org/KGoldrunner. Userbase already uses
> the userbase.kde.org/$APP scheme. Additionally
> http://techbase.kde.org/Projects/Games would be moved to
> techbase.kde.org/KDE_Games, so that if you want to get started contributing
> to a module, you go to techbase.kde.org/$MODULENAME.

What would we gain by such a change? The additional directory elements give 
information about the meaning of the page and provide people creating pages 
some structure, so we don't get a mess with a lot of different pages in a 
flat namespace.

> I think Projects/ makes more sense for things like:
>
> Projects/Migrate KMail to Akonadi
> Projects/Port KJots to KDE4 pillars
> Projects/Move libplama to kdelibs
> Projects/Reviewing techbase and userbase structure

I think this is a misunderstanding caused by our sloppy way of using the term 
project where it means sub-project of the KDE project. Actually the vast 
majority of pages under Projects/ are team pages.

But in the end it would be better to not have these pages on techbase at all. 
Techbase was meant to contain polished technical content for system 
administrators, third-party developers and external people interested in 
contributing to KDE. It wasn't meant as whiteboard for internal development 
information and mainly community related content.

My proposal would be to create a dedicated Wiki for community content which 
could server for all these purposes without degrading the quality of techbase 
by mixing in content not useful for techbase's target audience. This 
dedicated Wiki ("communitybase.kde.org"), would contain team pages, 
information about work in progress, could be used for community coordination, 
documentation about KDE internal processes, etc.

So as result we would get a clean structure with a natural place for 
everything I can think of:
- userbase for KDE users
- techbase for external KDE developers
- communitybase for KDE community content

> Yet another thing that I don't see a reason for is that it's not possible
> to create a 'normal' account on userbase. Why is that? Can we change it?

OpenID provides a lot of advantages, but also has some challenges. The OpenID 
handling on userbase could be a lot more user-friendly. But how to best deal 
with OpenID is a separate discussion.

-- 
Cornelius Schumacher <schumacher at kde.org>