HackMDNew Ansible Community Site Concept / Wishlist
tags: Website
Note: This is a product of collective thinking. When "I" is written across the text without nickname, it impersonal:)
Vision
A new home for all Ansible projects and community that is community-driven, designed, and maintained.
General Points
- No many clicks: Desired content should be discoverable within max 3 clicks from the landing page (ideally within 2).
- No scrolling down: It's important. The content of a page ideally fits one screen.
- Secondary info can be put in a footer a bit below main screen (can be accessed with slight finger move).
- No animated elements: Do not pull visitors' attention from what is really important.
- Strong mission statement: For now we'll put
Automation powered by people(taken from ansible.com/community) as a placeholder. A true statement will be developed later via survey.
Proposals / thoughts on General Points
- Learning journey: Site should also act as a learning journey for new visitors. This is not just a docs thing to solve but the web presence overall can help people move from new to expert and community participant.
- Supports forum, blogs, and videos
- Top forum posts: Sandra suggested having a dynamic box with top/recent posts like on linux.org if approved and when the forum is ready.
- Ansible Shop: Andersson007 think that it could be nice to have a place where people can order swag (our goal is not to sell swag but fans might want to order it).
- Contributions showcase: Where appropriate showcases contribution by the community.
Top Navigation Bar
Concept / Possible requirements
- Fixed: Ideally there'll be no need for scrolling down but even if it's on some pages, the bar will be accessible w/o a need to scroll up which would make it twice more annoying. Another suggestion is to make it not fixed to save space.
- Not big: But NOT too narrow.
Items we could put in the bar
- Strong mission statement: Andersson007 thinks maybe? if there's space on the left side. It's not yet developed, we could reserve space thought it's hard to predict how long it'll be. For now, we could put one of existing statements.
- Get started: Andersson007 thinks an alternative location can be just the top of the landing page as visitors (probably) don't need this all the time.
- Projects: a link to the new ecosystem page (under development) on docs.ansible.com.
- Join the Community: Matrix, mailing lists (probably need to stick around for a while as we get people used to the forum), Discourse forum (if accepted and ready), Bullhorn, Community-topics.
- Docs: Andersson007 wonders if it should be clicables (per project) pointing to corresponding docs on Projects page and some on Lear Ansible page.
- Learn Ansible: See the corresponding paragraph.
- Events: See the corresponding paragraph.
- Blog: See the corresponding paragraph.
Proposals / thoughts on the Top navigation bar
- [Andersson]: Contacts of the Community team? Can be also put in the footer.
- [Carol]: Maybe Tutorials and Getting started can both be part of the Learning Ansible page, or they can be different pages but under the same menu?
- [Andersson007] Getting Started: should it be present all the time? Maybe just in the top of the homepage would be enough?
- Your nick: your proposal
Landing Page (Homepage)
Concept / Possible Requirements
In general, the top of the landing page should be the main calls to action. Let’s not lose that important first eye contact with things most people will skip over.
- No distraction: no animated elements, videos, etc.
- No unnecessary / secondary information: At least at the top.
Items we could put in the landing page
- Overview: Maybe also elaborating on our mission?
- Getting Started: It can be also put in the top navigation bar but visitors (probably) don't need access to it all the time (it's one time thing probably).
- Personas entry points: Present a set of entry points/calls to areas of interest for each of our defined personas (user, developer, meetup organizer, etc).
- Projects diagram: an example if saltstack's page. Not sure if it doesn't take a lot of space, should there be a separate page with it?
- RHAAP: Mention RHAAP and how we are related yet different?
- I listed this with the assumption that we might get ansible.com and at least initially, people who continue to visit ansible.com could be looking for RHAAP. If we go with ansible.community then the footer would suffice.
Proposals / thoughts on Landing page
- Your nick: your proposal
Get Started
Needs to be filled up
Join the Community
Concept / Possible Requirements
- … Needs to be filled up
Items we could put in this page
- Links to community guide(s) for code of conduct, etc (how do we make this generic for all communities in the Ansible ecosystem??)
- Discourse forum
- Matrix space and rooms
- Community meeting calendar (link/embed)
- Community meeting logs: Link to location of community meeting logs
- “Unofficial” channels: like Reddit, discord, gitter etc.
- Community-topics
Proposals / thoughts
Docs
Concept / Possible Requirements
- A subsection of the website. Unlike today’s docs.ansible.com, this should be part of the same website design and published in the same way as the landing page and any other pages. The docsite page(s) then link to the published docset, which could be hosted on something like ReadTheDocs
- Upstream docs only
- Just links, or pulled and included in the site?
Items we could put in the page
- … Needs to be filled up
Proposals / thoughts on the Docsite page
- [Andersson007]: wonders if it should be clicables (per project) pointing to corresponding docs on Projects page and some on Lear Ansible page.
- Your nick: your proposal
Events
Items we could put in this page
- Upcoming events/conferences
- Event calendar
- Contributor summits/Community Days
- Meetup map
- How to start/organize a meetup group
- Meetup group of the month
Proposals / thoughts on the Events page
- Your nick: your proposal
Blog
Items we could put in this page
- Community members posts: Allow posts from community members (non red hatters) via PR process
- Bullhorn: Include The Bullhorn as posts (some people may prefer to subscribe to a blog than emails)
- RSS Feed: Make sure there’s RSS feed
- Release announcements: Announce new (major) releases with highlights of what’s new etc.
- Survey results and analysis: If Greg would like to post here instead of personal blog.
- Planet aggregation feed: Probably separate page or even subdomain such as planet.ansiblecommunity.org.
- Aggregated events from GH: This could also be used to aggregate events from github in addition to regular community blog posts, i.e: https://github.com/ansible-collections/community.general/releases.atom
Proposals / thoughts on the Blog page
- [Andersson007]: should be automated as much as possible not to get irrelevant one day
- Your nick: your proposal
Learn Ansible
Items we could put in this page
- Docsite landing page: docs.ansible.com new personas-based landing page when ready
- Instruqt labs:
- Describe and link out to the most popular Instruqt Labs
- Have a general link to all Instruqt labs
- Other recommended resources: Links to things like:
- Jeff Geerling’s books - Ansible for DevOps, Ansible for Kubernetes
- Ansible Up & Running (Rene Moser)
- James Freeman, Jesse Keating, etc.
- Intro video:: ?
Proposals / thoughts on the Learning Ansible page
- Your nick: your proposal
Footer
- Code of Conduct
- Legal
- Logos and usage guidelines
- Security: What is it about?
- Social media: icons/links
- RHAAP
- “Sponsored by Red Hat”
Proposals / thoughts on Footer
- Your nick: your proposal
Sites to consider:
- zeromq: generally good but the banner shouldn't be so big.
- rdoproject: just looking good.
- saltproject get started subprojects diagram.
- linux.org: recent forum posts.
- react: to see how docs are integrated (Get started, Learn basics).
- kubernetes community: has a great landing page with overview
- podman community: new site in dev
- fedora project new fedora site
Proposals / thoughts on Sites to consider
- Your nick: a site you think worth looking at, why?
