Vertical nav

["Carol Geyer" <carol.geyer@oasis-open.org>]

Bruce raises a good point about mentioning the Categories view on the wiki
homepage. I think the link to Categories should be prominent throughout the
site, since many people may skip the wiki homepage.

This brings us back to reorganizing the vertical navigation column. I've
experimented with two other approaches at http://bpel.xml.org/ and
http://saml.xml.org/. 

I think Su-Laine feels the CONTRIBUTE section on http://saml.xml.org/ is a
waste of space, and part of me agrees with her. The other part of me is still
concerned that some people just don't *get* all their options for interacting
with the site, which makes me want to err on the side of being obvious.

What do others think?

 

-----Original Message-----
From: Bruce Esrig [mailto:esrig-ia@esrig.com] 
Sent: Wednesday, November 28, 2007 5:32 AM
To: 'DITA Editorial Board'
Cc: 'Neil Joseph Schelly'; jose.marquez@oasis-open.org
Subject: RE: [dita-fa-edboard] categories nicely organized

I've finished one pass through the site map. Each page has one or more 
relevant tags (except for a small number that are a bit out of date).

The Categories view is a bit jumbled at the moment. There aren't very many 
articles to tag, so what gets tagged a lot is sometimes surprising. The 
next pass would be to add summary tags by working up the taxonomy to add 
parents of the tags that are already on each article. One for the taxonomy 
administration wish list: a way to check off a set of articles and add a 
tag to all of them at once.

Next steps:
  - Explanation of how to tag
  - Mention categories view on the wiki home page

Questions:
  - Would it be worthwhile to tag all the Articles "Article" and so on? 
There are lots of relevant items that can't be tagged, so users have to use 
two mechanisms to find the info. For example, to connect up the 
"Specializations" subject with the news item about the Troubleshooting 
specialization, I had to edit a page and add a link, because the news item 
couldn't be tagged, but it was the best place to get a non-vendor-specific 
intro.
  - Could regular users have read-only access to the Taxonomy Manager, so 
they can see all the tags in an organized way? This would help with picking 
tags to explore, and with future tagging.

Best wishes,

Bruce

At 02:16 PM 11/26/2007, Carol Geyer wrote:
>Bruce,
>Thanks so much for tackling this. It's really a big improvement.
>
>When you say the wiki links are broken, can you provide a few examples so we
>can track this down? Keep in mind, the links that appear in red are stub pages
>(suggestions for topics for which pages haven't been created yet). I guess we
>should consider how we can make that more obvious. Not everyone is wiki-savvy
>(I'm certainly living proof of that).
>
>I've removed your note about broken wiki links but left in the reference 
>to the
>site map, which I think is very helpful.
>
>Carol
>
>
>-----Original Message-----
>From: Bruce Esrig [mailto:esrig-ia@esrig.com]
>Sent: Monday, November 26, 2007 7:36 AM
>To: 'DITA Editorial Board'
>Subject: Re: [dita-fa-edboard] categories nicely organized
>
>Over the weekend, I categorized about half the book file topics in the site
>map. On most of the pages, there are no apparent content changes. (I did a
>little tinkering on one of the specialization topics to connect the pages
>better.)
>
>The links from the home page of the wiki seem to be broken ... I'm not sure
>whether freelinking is supposed to work for them, so I just left the links
>alone and added a second paragraph at the top advertising the site map.
>Once the categorizing is done, we can advertise the tag cloud.
>
>Best wishes,
>
>Bruce
>
>At 06:23 AM 11/19/2007, Bruce Esrig wrote:
> >I built a nice taxonomy using the existing categories from DITA Today,
> >Forums, Product features, Resources, and Service offerings. There are a
> >few items that appear in more than one place. The biggest example is that
> >Resources appears at top level and also under DITA Today.
> >
> >For the time being, I'll show you what I've got (Word file, enclosed). The
> >next step is to make it available on the site. A tag doesn't show up in
> >the tag cloud until it is used to tag an item.
> >
> >A good way to use the taxonomy is to find good super-categories. For
> >example, Michael Priestly blogged from DITA LavaCon (I think that's the
> >name). I was supplemented the tag he provided with "Event reports", so now
> >both tags get you to his article. Similarly, Don Day had a blog entry on
> >Editors, so I added some tags about editors from the Product features area
> >to that entry. (I might have gone overboard with Don's.)
> >
> >Here's the file ...
> >
> >Best wishes,
> >
> >Bruce
> >
> >
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