monkdiscuss
ELISHEVA
<p>A few weeks ago [cosmicperl] began a [id://742037|discussion] about the pros and cons of a newbie focused satellite site for Perl Monks. The suggestion of a new beginners only site was not particularly well received, and instead triggered a large number of suggestions about how the current Perl Monks could be improved.</p>
<p>This is only one of many threads where suggestions for improving PM have been offered. In the coming weeks, I hope to construct a list of some of the more recent threads. I will also be reviewing them and compiling a list of suggestions that people have made for improving PM. If anyone else is interested in working on this, please make yourself known.</p>
<p>This process (and this post) is an outgrowth of the discussion we had last week on the thread [id://749906]. We have at present no "official" wish list or mechanism for prioritizing suggestions for site improvement. In that thread [jdporter] suggested that for the time being, one way to get a better understanding of what changes matter to us monks would be to compile a list of suggestions from PM discussion threads.</p>
<p>Some of the proposals in [id://742037] are very specific; some simply point out general areas where improvement might be valuable. I've assembled a list (below) of the various suggestions from that post in hopes of stimulating discussion on the following questions:</p>
<ul>
<li>Which, if any, of these suggestions do you feel are
valuable enough to merit further discussion?</li>
<li>Do you see a consensus developing around any of the suggestions?</li>
<li>What suggestions would you add that aren't already on
the list?</li>
<li>What do you value most about Perl Monks and which of these suggestions enhance or build upon that?</li>
<li>Which of these have in fact been implemented but need
to be better publicized?</li>
<p> </p>
<li>As we work through other threads and gather their suggestions what is the best format for organizing them? Do we want to see other "per-thread" summaries? What about consolidating all suggestions into a single list?</li>
<li>If more that one person is involved in compiling a list of suggestions (and I <i>really</i> hope there will be), what tools does PM provide to help us coordinate our work?</li>
<li>How would you prioritize these suggestions? What is the best way to keep track of a developing consensus about which suggestions are highest priority? Is there a way we could adapt the polling mechanism? Is a qualitative summary the best way? Some combination?</li>
<p> </p>
<li>To the members of [cabal], and [pmdev] in particular: What would it take to actually implement the more specific suggestions - both technically and in terms of support from the wider monk community?</li>
<li>What would you be willing to do to help make your favorite suggestion "happen"?</li>
<li>This thread gives examples of suggestions, some clear and some overly general. If you were to write a <i>How (Not) to propose a site improvement</i> tutorial, what would it include?</li>
<li>Was the format of this post helpful? What would you do to improve upon it?</li>
</ul>
<p>If there is no objection, when this thread winds down, I will summarize the comments here and post the results so that we can continue to build on the discussion.</p>
<p>Best, beth</p>
<p><b>Note 1:</b> My apologies in advance if I left out anyone's suggestion or misrepresented their views. If I have done so, please message me and I will make the correction.</p>
<p><b>Note 2:</b>Many thanks to all those who gave suggestions privately and on the thread [id://749906] about how to go about this task. They made this thread possible.</p>
<readmore>
<p>Suggestions have been grouped into one of the following categories:
<ul>
<li><a href="#lookAndFeel">Site look and feel suggestions</a></li>
<li><a href="#content">Site content and navigation suggestions</a></li>
<li><a href="#community">Community building suggestions</a></li>
<li><a href="#performance">Site performance suggestions</a></li>
<li><a href="#devtools">Site development tool suggestions</a></li>
<li><a href="#inspire">Places to look for further inspiration</a></li>
</ul>
</p>
<h3><a name="lookAndFeel">Site look and feel suggestions</a></h3>
<ul>
<li>site not easy to use
<ul>
<li>[Aim9b] at [id://743214] - could be more intuitive, more "challenging" than it needs be, but using too much GUI to do it, might make the site unwieldy for people still using dial-up</li>
</ul>
</li>
<li>freshen up site - site looks dated:
<ul>
<li>[cosmicperl] at [id://742060]</li>
<li>[TGI] at [id://742523] agrees, but is concerned that adding flashy, but buggy AJAX and javascript will do more harm than good.</li>
<li>[missingthepoint] at [id://742218] quoting [petdance|Andy Lester]'s PerlBuzz article [http://perlbuzz.com/2008/05/perl-decentralize-diversify-colonize.html] - "Perlmonks is a fine site, but it's long in the tooth"</li>
<li>[jdporter] at [id://742529] - "guilty" - goodies shouldn't be limited to beginners.</li>
<li>[cutlass2006] at [id://742747] - design could be made more readable, "fresher"</li>
</ul></li>
<li>Several expressed concern that "pretty sites" shouldn't be a substitute for strong content and
community and may even help to keep the community
focused on the needs of programmers:
<ul>
<li>[roboticus] at [id://742088] - agrees it isn't the most modern, but thinks too many bells and whistles would get in the way: "content is king"</li>
<li>[talexb] at [id://742185] - strength of community and content are what count.</li>
<li>[matze77] at [id://742146] - too much flash is hard on low-band width users (of which [matze77] is one)</li>
<li>[salazar] at [id://742163] notes perl programmers need to know how to deal with command lines and text based tools, If they absolutely cannot, they aren't much likely to be much good with Perl either.</li>
</ul></li>
<li>WSIWYG text editing interface would be easier for
beginners
<ul>
<li>[mr_mischief] at [id://742042], suggests <strike>TinyMCE might help some</strike> that TinyMCE has a feature that would be helpful (automatically converting two consecutive new lines to a paragraph break) but Slashdot implements it without using TinyMCE. Other TinyMCE features add complexity without much benefit - please see [id://751587] below for further clarifications.</li>
<li>[cosmicperl] at [id://742060], but worries something like TinyMCE would irritate experienced editors.</li>
<li>[shmem] at [id://742175] objects - it would just exchange one mess with another.</li>
</ul></li>
<li>Simpler markup is needed
<ul>
<li>[moritz] at [id://742125] - perhaps some form of extended POD markup with better support for links: paragraph and code sections are much easier with POD than current HTML tags.</li>
<li>[shmem] at [id://742175] objects - thinks markup is already easy and POD wouldn't be easier for a newcomer.</li>
</ul></li>
<li>Add preview mode for update
<ul>
<li>[ELISHEVA] at [id://742171]</li>
</ul></li>
<li>Add preview mode for private messages and chatter box
messages:
<ul>
<li>[ELISHEVA] at [id://742171]</li>
</ul></li>
</ul>
<h3><a name="content">Site content and navigation suggestions</a></h3>
<ul>
<li>Improve quality/finability of documentation targetted at newbies
<ul>
<li>[matze77] at [id://742146] - thinks some of the new user documentation may be a bit outdated and more of it (or making what there is easier to find) would be a good idea: e.g better tutorials or guides, book reviews targetted at beginners.</li>
<li>[cutlass2006] at [id://742747] - provide options like textarea editing as a progressively disclosed option <i>(ed. note: not entirely clear to me what this means)</i></li>
<li>[cutlass2006] at [id://742747] - easy to find "Getting started with Perl" document.</li>
</ul>
<li>Beginners section/"Beginner's corner" page
<ul>
<li>[salazar] at [id://742163] - even if PM does in fact welcome newcomer questions, it doesn't <i>feel</i> like it when you are new. </li>
<li>[ELISHEVA] at [id://742171] - page where beginners could post questions - see questions posted by
other beginners, and trust an experienced monk to put their post in the right place.</li>
<li>[Argel] at [id://742518] - asks how hard would such a page be to add?</li>
<li>[Aim9b] at [id://743214] - material for newbies often exists, but is hard to find, having it collected together some place would help.</li>
</ul></li>
<li>[cutlass2006] at [id://742747] - additional/better organized links to other Perl resources, e.g. "Here is the route to Perl6"</li>
</ul>
<h3><a name="community">Community building suggestions</a></h3>
<ul>
<li>Better site promotion is needed
<ul>
<li>[Your Mother] at [id://742276]</li>
<li>[missingthepoint] at [id://742343]</li>
<li>[matze77] at [id://742146] - suggests we (a) all do a bit more to "spread the word"; (b) if you have a website that was written in perl that you have a "designed with Perl" on your page that links back to PM; (c) think about how to do "public relations" for Perl</li>
</ul></li>
<li>We need to make better use of social networking tools for community building
<ul>
<li>[cutlass2006] at [id://742747] - more use of
twitter (person to person - fellow monks following each other, not just broadcasting root nodes), adding support for tagging (delicious etc)</li>
<li>[Corion] at [id://742749] - [http://twitter.com/perlnews/|PerlNews] broadcasts all new root nodes on Twitter</li>
</ul></li>
</ul>
<h3><a name="performance">Site performance suggestions</a></h3>
<ul>
</ul>
<h3><a name="devtools">Site development tool suggestions</a></h3>
<ul>
<li>[cutlass2006] at [id://742747] - site data exposed via REST</li>
</ul>
<h3><a name="inspire">Places to look for further inspiration</h3>
<ul>
<li>StackOverflow
<ul>
<li>[cutlass2006] at [id://742747] and [id://743014]- thinks we could learn something from it, though he agrees it has problems</li>
<li>[parv] at [id://742943] says it has performance problems in Firefox and Opera</li>
</ul></li>
</ul>
</readmore>