[Users] website design

[Tim Schaub]

Hey-

I was hoping to get some feedback from the community about design ideas 
for the GeoExt website.  We have some design time for this at OpenGeo 
and would like to do some spiffing up of the site to the extent that the 
proposal is met with approval.

We're hoping to kick out an initial release in the upcoming weeks.  This 
will be a pre-stable API release, but it will give folks a chance to try 
out what we've got.

It would be great if the site, docs, and examples were welcoming and 
usable before that release.

So, I'd like to propose a change in the website on two fronts: framework 
and design.

First, Instead of having the whole http://geoext.org site managed by 
trac, I'd like to have two parts to the website - one managed by trac 
(/dev perhaps) and the rest by something else.  I'd propose we manage 
the rest of the website content in svn, written in rst, and built with 
Sphinx.  The part managed by trac would just be the "development" 
section of the site - roadmap, tickets, etc. (with very little emphasis 
on the wiki).

Second, we'd like to have a nice visual design that integrates the 
website.  Phil Ashlock (TOPP designer) has put together the mockup below 
to show what the trac portion of the website could look like:

http://img.skitch.com/20090409-jksimuqt2axkrciw386bx2n3f4.png

Menu items would change depending on context.  The http://geoext.org 
part of the site would not feature links to tickets, timeline, etc - 
just to development (similar to http://jquery.com/ and 
http://dev.jquery.com/).

So, are people generally in favor of this?  If so, we can spend some 
more time on the design and will collect more comments along the way.

Thanks for feedback,
Tim

-- 
Tim Schaub
OpenGeo - http://opengeo.org
Expert service straight from the developers.