[Mono-docs-list] Manuals and Docs

[Zac Bowling]

Some very good points. Most of have a hard time seeing the site from the
prospective of a newbie. I myself hard a hard time trying to think of a
better flow, and at one point was going to start a new site external to
mono to help organize the documentation (before we moved to wiki). 

Now with the wiki, we should be able to work something out, maybe under
a testing user space (like "/new/Articles" and "/new/Docs"), and when a
viable solution seems to work, we can migrate those back to the main
pages. 

Also as much as like the new theme for artistic design, its not a useful
as it could be. 

If you break it down you have 
	* Start
	* Use
	* Contribute

in one area and then:

	* Screenshots
	* Download Now
	* Manuals and Docs
	* Blogs (Offsite link)

Well manuals and docs overlap in concept with Start and Use. Start is
ambiguous. Maybe something like "About" or "FAQs" or "Getting Started".
Really something like that should be a link on the home page or maybe a
sub-link on a list of FAQs or about section. 

Because its wiki, we have some major flexibility, but it means we might
need to change the main template to work it in. 

I have a lot of ideas that would be good to get down, maybe even make
some mock ups under my userspace on the wiki. I feel the same way, the
current system doesn't flow very well and needs some major rethinking.

Zac


On Thu, 2006-04-27 at 23:34 +0200, Gilles Fabio wrote:
> Hello everyone!
> 
> My name is Gilles, I'm 23 years-old and I actually live in France (I'm
> going to move to Australia pretty soon). I'm a Mono Lover. Thanks to
> the team and contributors for all your work.
> 
> Well, it's just my point of view. I really don't like the structure of
> the official website concerning documentation. Imagine I'm a newbie. I
> downloaded Mono and I would like to program my first application to
> understand how Mono works. I click on "Manuals and docs" in the top
> right and boom! I have before my eyes an "expert" documentation. I'm
> just a newbie! Wow! Too many libraries! It's really cool but I'm lost!
> I know that I can program a GUI application with Gtk# but how to do?
> If I click on "Gnome Libraries" and "Gtk", I find tones of classes but
> I absolutely don't know how to use them. So, I return to the main page
> and the only one link which sounds good to me is "Articles". I click
> on this link and on the Articles page, titles are organized by date of
> publication. It's not coherent. It would be better to organize
> articles by domain of application. The Article link on the main page
> is like "it's kind of something not important" but it's really
> important! So, that's what I propose.
> 
> (1) When we click on "Manuals and docs", we go to the page "Manuals and docs"
> (2) On the top right of this page, a link to the API doc
> (http://www.go-mono.com/docs/).
> (3) On the top left of this page, a link to the Monkeyguide
> (4) In the content section of this page, articles organized by domain
> of application
> 
> I think It's more coherent and newbies won't be lost.
> 
> It was the first point. Now, the second point: translations.
> 
> It would be really good to propose articles/howtos translations
> directly on the website just after the article/howto link, so like
> this: "Hello World!" in Gtk# [english - spanish - french] and inciting
> people to contribute directly on the website. So like that, when
> someone will want to write an article/howto on their personal
> website/project, they just will have to check if the article already
> exists and why not to officially link their article/howto in this
> section if it doesn't talk about an existing subject yet.
> 
> Voila :) I say it again, it's only my point of view so very
> subjective. I'm ready to contribute if you wish.
> 
> Regards,
> Gilles
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