[news.eclipse.technology.phoenix] Re: Knowledge & Content Management Asp

[Denis Roy <webmaster@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Volker Renneberg wrote:
> Hi!
>
> I just found this project and the associated newsgroup. I am wondering 
> whether there is still traffic in this group or not?
>
> I was working with Eclipse as a Java development platform for quite a while 
> and started to look at the RCP features one or two weeks ago. Due to the 
> complexity of the whole issue I tried to find information on RCP, different 
> ongoing projects+description, available plugins, API/Javadoc.
>
> Looking at the phoenix project, it all looks very technical. With my 
> background of the last two weeks I am very interested whether there is a 
> more conceptual view on the available and required information on the 
> Eclipse website. While trying to grasp all the details necessary to develop 
> plugins, I got lost very very fast.... I believe, all the necessary 
> documentation is available on the Eclipse site and associated sites. But I 
> somehow miss the structure. I would so much be interested in a 
> non-programmatic view on the final website structure. Is there any document 
> that contains the ideas of the future system? To be more precise: I am not 
> interested in how to develop a site. I am interested in knowledge management 
> aspects. How will the future site be able to provide the user with a good 
> and easy to use organisation of the available content.
>
> Cheers
> Volker


Volker,

I've been meaning to reply to this for some time now.

I think I need to clarify what the "future site" is, as you refer to it. 
 The Phoenix project was created in April 2005 as a temporary effort to 
redesign the website as it was in 2005.  We have done so, and because 
there will always be room for improvement, we kept the Phoenix project 
alive to manage the ongoing maintenance of the site, in an open and 
transparent fashion. Currently, we have no plans to redesign or 
rearchitect the site.

Back in 2005, we worked with an Information Architect and a CMS 
consultant to help us create (and implement) a better structure for the 
site's information. Although we implemented many ideas and have 
restructured the site to some extent, we faced many challenges with the 
sheer volume of information on the site, the broad audience we cater to, 
the diverse teams of content authors and the limited resources of the 
small Phoenix team.

If you are interested in reading *how* we came to the solution you see 
on the website today, the Phoenix mailing list archives[1] will lead to 
the many IA documents and discussions we have had. I have highlighted 
some below [2].

In the future it may be a good idea for the Phoenix team to invest a bit 
of time to revisit some of those documents to determine how we can 
improve our site. However, since launching our new site in November 2005 
and with steady, small improvements over time, the amount of feedback 
from confused/lost users has been fairly low. This perhaps explains why 
nothing major has happened with Phoenix since the 2005 launch, as we 
probably sense that the site's structure is "not great, but good enough".

We are more than welcome to any suggestions on areas where we can 
improve, if you have any.

Thanks for your interest.  I hope this answers most of the questions you 
had about our site.


Denis


[1] http://dev.eclipse.org/mhonarc/lists/phoenix-dev/mail7.html

[2] Selected documents:

Audience persona:
http://dev.eclipse.org/mhonarc/lists/phoenix-dev/msg00003.html

Benchmark sites we examined:
http://dev.eclipse.org/mhonarc/lists/phoenix-dev/msg00007.html

Audiences and information needs:
http://dev.eclipse.org/mhonarc/lists/phoenix-dev/msg00037.html

CMS wish list:
http://dev.eclipse.org/mhonarc/lists/phoenix-dev/msg00058.html

Use case survey:
http://dev.eclipse.org/mhonarc/lists/phoenix-dev/msg00075.html

Page Wire Frames:
http://dev.eclipse.org/mhonarc/lists/phoenix-dev/msg00093.html

Conceptual IA & content ownership:
http://dev.eclipse.org/mhonarc/lists/phoenix-dev/msg00107.html

IA Specs:
http://dev.eclipse.org/mhonarc/lists/phoenix-dev/msg00148.html




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