www.gnucash.org simplification proposal

Josh Sled jsled at asynchronous.org
Mon Jan 23 23:29:44 EST 2006


I don't consider this a high-priority item, but it might be nice to
resolve before the next release.  [Certainly the very-subset of things
about the Features and Screenshots pages will at least need to be
revisited before the next release indepdent of all this...]

I'm always annoyed at the complexity of www.gnucash.org. Things like
re-creations of the AUTHORS file and two different versions of
forward-looking project plans (that don't reflect reality) don't do
anyone much good.  They're just more data to store, more to think about,
confusing for people trying to find information and more inertia for the
site and project.

As such, I'd like to propose the following simplifications of the
gnucash website by enumerating my disposition towards the navigation
menu items.  Where a menu-item goes away and links to pages on the
gnucash.org website, those pages, too, go away; I'll denote those with a
"[+]", meaning "win".

- General Information
  - Home / News
    - Keep, of course
  - Features
    - Keep, simplify
  - Screenshots
    - [+] Kill; merge with features.
  - Donations
    - [+] Keep, but just point to sourceforge.
  - How To Help
    - [+] Kill
  - Software Dependencies
    - [+] Kill 

- Documentation
  - Wiki/FAQ [de]
    - Fine; make the "FAQ" link seperate, though.
  - Concepts Guide
    - Fine.
  - Help Manual [de]
    - Fine.
  - SQL HOWTO
    - [+] Kill; dead and a FAQ.
  - more...
    - [+] Kill.

- Help
  [- retitle "resources"]
  - Mailing Lists
    - fine
  - Bug Reports
    - fine.
  - IRC (Chat)
    - fine.

- Downloads
  [all fine]
  - USA (master site)
  - Europe
  - SourceForge
  - Australia

- Developer Information
  -  System Architecture
     - [+] Kill; Dead/moved to doxygen, "Source Docs", below.
  -  The Road Ahead
     - [+] Kill; http://wiki.g.o/wiki/Roadmap , but no nav-link needed.
  -  Devel Wiki
     - Kill; Ever used?
  -  Project Plans (old)
     - Kill; Really dead
  -  Source Docs
     - Fine, but merge with "System Architecture" above.
  -  Browse Source
     - Fine.
  -  Subversion Access
     - Link to wiki; maybe merge with above as "source"?
  -  Language Translations
     - Fine.

- Other Information
  -  Related Financial Software
     - [+] Kill; They can use Freshmeat and Google.
  -  GnuCash in the News
     - [+] Kill; Google, RSS feeds, &c. 
  -  GnuCash Banners!
     - [+] Kill; who cares or uses?
  -  History & Credits
     - [+] Kill; in AUTHORS, no need to duplicate.
  -  Survey Results
     - [+] Kill; once interesting, now out of date.
  -  Sizing
     - [+] Kill; Interesting, but in emailWho cares?  
  -  RSS
     - Kill; Move to appropriate places (<link .../>, page footer)

- Search 
  - Kill [, or at least fix so it works, perhaps by just redirecting to 
          Google with a "site:gnucash.org" term.]


Notes:

- This proposal would eliminate basically all "novel" www.gnucash.org
content except for the minimum necessary to promote the project
(home/news + features, really.  Everything else is a link to bugzilla,
svn, wiki, lists or google. )

- Somewhere between 'features' and 'help' is something like a targeted
tutorial ... maybe even videos demonstrating doing specific things like
a multi-line split or setting up stock accounts.   That's a different
topic once we get closer to the release, I think.

-- 
...jsled
http://asynchronous.org/ - `a=jsled; b=asynchronous.org; echo ${a}@${b}`


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