RE: [PHP-DEV] New Site From: Colin Viebrock (colin <email protected>)
Date: 11/27/00

> My current issues:
> Flags separate manual section header and section items (? Intentional ?)

Probably not. IMHO, the flags are too big. A text dropdown list might be
better anyway.

> Pop-up layers aren't working with NN6 (an NN 6 issue)

Well, NN6 wasn't out when I did the last design, so ... :)
Cool as they are, will people be really upset to see them go?

> Search rankings? (Should function listings be at the top?)

Good idea. Rasmus was talking about redoing the search in UDMSearch,
instead
of Ht://Dig. I'd like to see the search available on all mirror sites,
personally, but I don't know how practical that is.

> View source not working in all languages. see:
> http://www.php.net/source.php?page_url=/manual/hu/function.pdf-show-xy.php

Hmmm ... don't know why that isn't working.

> No low-bandwidth version for non-manual pages.

I'd like to make the *whole* site lower-bandwidth. :)

> Left bar gets in the way of content space on some pages:
> http://www.php.net/manual/function.mcrypt-module-get-algo-supporte
> d-key-sizes.php

Well, what do you expect when your function names are 42 characters long. :)
But, yes, this needs to be addressed too.

Your comments about ...

Load time/bandwidth:

> Perhaps it's not something required by the site, but merely the
> implementation
> of it. I count roughly 17 needed Gif's on the home page, plus 6
> for the popups.

In addition to index.php (32k), the main page at php.net has 39 GIFs
(30k) plus the CSS file (5k). Total: 67k. The manual pages are
pretty similar in size.

Yes, un-rounding the corners will save quite a bit. That's part of
the plan.

> One thing that I think we could do to strip down on manual pages is to
> convert the language flags into a language popup. As it is, it's
> more focused on nations that languages, which, well, aside from
> the creepy crawlies of nationist movements, isn't really that helpful
> for folks who don't recognize the flag.

Well, Rasmus has already made his thoughts known on this. A language
drop-down -- note that I'm saying "drop-down" instead of "pop-up" :) --
would be good. But so would images a quarter of the size.

Popups:

> <rant>
> There comes a time in your computing history where you either have
> to update, or take the risk of supporting ancient code and sounding
> like a kook because you refuse to use current technologies. DHTML
> is *ancient* technology, it was rolling out around the same time, IIRC,
> as PHP 3 was. If you can't be bothered to use current technology,
> eventually, people will not be bothered to support you.
> </rant>

I'm not quite sure if you are arguing in support of pop-ups (and keeping
up on the code required to handle it for the latest and greatest (ahem)
versions of IE/NS on all platforms) ... or against them.

> Now, that being said, the manual section of the site has already
> slain this problem. Low-bandwidth, old school, and high-bandwidth,
> bells and whistles, versions of the site would be *extremely*
> easy to build from the current site, or build into a new site.

Yeah ... but if the whole site was much lower bandwidth, that would
solve the same problem, no?

Also, I actually don't think its the amount of data that makes the site
slow, as much as it is the way the site is all layed out into one big
table. Your browser needs to download everything before it starts trying
to lay it out, which slows it down I think. That's why in the new
design I made the top and bottom sections their own table, and the main
body of the site would be it's own table ... or not.

> To me, this is more important than an issue of whether or not the
> bells and whistles are new, old, bleeding edge, whatever.

Agreed. I think. :)

Mirroring:

> That's a bit disturbing. We should probably have some policy guidelines
> for sync frequency. The updates are _much_ shorter when done
> frequently. Of course, if they _don't_ have bandwidth to spare,
> being a mirror is moot anyways.

I discovered that there *are* lots of unofficial mirrors "stealing"
the bandwidth. I'm thinking a distributed system might be in order
(see Rasmus' posts).

> Something to consider:
> If the php.net dns got hosed, they all fall down. This makes the
> current setup much more failure tolerant, as a zone wide dns
> outage/blackhole doesn't take the entire system into the dark.

If the PHP.net DNS gets hosed, I'm out of a job. ;) It won't.
Trust me.

Management:

> The counterpoint is: "it's a pain in the ass to use a database interface
> just to add news items, new links, projects, or sites, HTML would
> be easier".

I don't agree. Also, remember that it wouldn't be you or I using the
database. Joe PHP-Site-Owner would add his own news/link/project/site
listing and you or I would just have to approve them.

Advertising:

> Hate it. I can also sell out the sides of my car for advertising, and surf
> for "free" by getting an ad-based portal, or even get a "free computer"
> if I subject myself to more advertising.

Well, I'm not a huge fan either. But we *do* have an incredibly popular
site, and the project could use some money I am sure.

I think this should probably not be open for too much public discussion,
but be left to the principals in the PHP Association to decide.

Other stuff:

> Hard for me to read at first glance (lemme guess, you surf with IE
> or in a text app? I'm in NN 4.75), and it really needs to have a
> space, and area, for quick links... as I spend most of my time (and
> I assume the same applies for most users) in the manual area, I'd *really*
> like to see some mock manual pages as part of any speculative redesigns,
> at it's the most conent-heavy are we have.

Good guess on my app. :) But I also looked at the site through NS6 which
looks pretty much the same. I'l try and get someone here with NS 4.75 to
look at it.

Keep in mind (and I hate this more than IE/NS issues) is that Netscape was
notorious for looking completely different based on the platform. Fonts on
Linux are considerably small than they are on a PC, and layers work
differently
on a Mac than they do on either.

Send me a screen shot, would ya?

I make mock-ups of some manual pages, as you suggested:

> http://www.php.net/manual/ref.session.php
> http://www.php.net/manual/function.pdf-get-image-width.php
> http://www.php.net/manual/function.ereg-replace.php

> This might point out one of my main questions about download times,
> which is that our notes are much more bandwidth intensive than the
> GIF's are. The GIF's are all of one download, and then a pull
> from cache. The notes are new for each page.

Yes, and all in one table (see my notes above).

> It might also help show why some of the current design decisions
> work (the half wrapping bar to show more content, prev/next
> buttons/links, an image showing what manual page you are on,
> etc.)

Half-wrapping bar? What is that?

I agree that the next/prev are probably under-used.

> And swapping blue for lavender is fine by me, but it does have
> some cultural connotations in the states. :-)

Lavender? I'd call it purple. :)

Anyway, thanks for all the comments. I'm thinking that maybe a
separate mailing list might be in order, just to keep the traffic down
for people who don't care as much. We can post weekly summaries to
php-dev or something like that.

- Colin 

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