New User Experience

Jesse Phillips jessekphillips at gmail.com
Mon Jun 29 19:21:03 PDT 2009


On Mon, 29 Jun 2009 18:03:59 -0400, Nick Sabalausky wrote:



> 
> digitalmars.com/d:
> 
> - Being the official entry-point to all things D, www.digitalmars.com/d
> should take people directly to D1
> (http://www.digitalmars.com/d/1.0/index.html) instead of essentially a
> D2 home that links primarily to D2 pages.
> 
> - Right there on www.digitalmars.com/d it should be made very clear that
> D1 is the current standard and used by most libs, D2 is
> unstable/in-development. And either there or on the main D2 page that D2
> may require some porting, but not too much, and primarily only for
> things relating to X, Y or Z, whatever X, Y and Z may actually be.

I am hoping to get Wiki4D into this state. It would be better on the 
official site, but I'm hoping that people will be able to use Wiki4D to 
navigate the official pages. I've already restructured the site, but it 
still has a lot of missing content.

> - Somewhere prominent (buy maybe not too prominent? FAQ page, maybe?),
> there should be an admission of the Phobos/Tango situation (because
> people are going to find out anyway) together with a well-written
> explanation of why/how it occurred, why people shouldn't just dismiss D
> because of it, what's being done about it, DRuntime, etc.

It is more of a community issue than a language issue. Though it might be 
appropriate mention and point to community maintained page about it i.e.

http://www.prowiki.org/wiki4d/wiki.cgi?StandardLib

Another thing I need to clean up to help explain the current situation.

> - digitalmars.com/d should be converted to run on some sort of wiki or
> content management software so that, not necessarily the public, but at
> least a select few individuals can help keep "official"
> content/links/etc up-to-date without Walter needing to be bothered to
> take extra time do it. The D Wiki is great, but it's existence isn't
> exactly obvious for someone coming in through digitalmars.com/d. This
> would solve that and keep the whole thing relatively future-proof.

The issues with this is that the Phobos docs are generated ddoc files. It 
wouldn't be a good mix to have part wiki part not wiki. I also don't 
think this would be necessary, Walter would probably be willing to let 
the select few restructure it with the current code. Also I don't see 
this working out considering how poorly Wiki4D has been kept up-to-date.
 
> - digitalmars.com/d (Sorry, I don't mean to keep picking on
> digitalmars.com, it's just that it probably is the most relevant site to
> the new user experience. We care about it!) should somehow treat
> digitalmars.D.learn as the "main" D newsgroup and/or lead new users
> there instead of here. And digitalmars.D should be treated as more
> advanced. Maybe some minor name changes might be in order after all. I
> mean, "digitalmars.D" does make it sound like it's the main ng, and
> "digitalmars.D.learn" makes it sound like getting-started/newbies-only
> stuff. (Yea, I know we've been over that before, sorry.)

Good idea, I'll work it into Wiki4D's structure. Can't do much about 
digitalmars.com

> 
> DSource:
> 
> -Can't tell what's old/new/popular/abandoned/stable/alpha/etc. At the
> very lest, a hand-picked "top star projects" added the top would make a
> big difference. We could do some sort of formal or informal voting or
> rough consensus here to be fair. Or not.

I'm going to work out something on Wiki4D where only usable projects are 
listed and common ones are more prominent.

I think the second biggest issues with projects is what is supported. 
D1.x or D2.x uses Phobos or Tango. Also platform support is probably one.



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