Give us feedback for the new Xen.org site

Give us feedback for the new Xen.org site

[Lars Kurth]

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Dear Community Members,

I am finally able to build a new website for Xen.org. The aim of this 
work is to create an engaging and integrated community web site that 
invites participation and acts as a portal for Xen users, developers and 
companies in the eco-system. You can give input on the site by going to 
http://wiki.xen.org/wiki/New_Xen_Website

The new site will have several main areas:

The home page, which mainly acts as an aggregator for news and activity 
happening in the community. This should make it easier for newcomers to 
Xen, to have a brief look and get a feeling of the vibrancy of the Xen 
community.There is actually a lot of activity today: it is merely 
obscured and hidden as the activity is dispersed to many places. The 
home page will also provide a window into the new Xen.org blog, as well 
as sections for Xen events, etc.

An area for users. This area will provide information about Xen and Xen 
projects, will help you learn about Xen, will point people to downloads 
and Linux/Unix distributions that contain Xen, will help you find 
documentation,will help you get help and support, etc. Xen has 
traditionally been a very developer focused community.As a consequence 
we have not supported our users that well. I have some open questions in 
this area, where I will be looking for your input. For example: is there 
a preference for mailing lists, forums, or stackoverflow like 
functionality? How should we best link to Linux distributions and other 
projects that distribute Xen?

An eco-system area: this is essentially a searchable directory of 
product and projects that use Xen, modify Xen, build on top of Xen, 
distribute Xen, etc. It is also a directory of research around Xen and 
services such as consultancy, training, hosting and cloud vendors that 
are built on top of Xen. This section will be fairly interactive: the 
intention is that if you are a vendor, you can add an entry to the 
directory which will be approved by a moderator moderator before 
publication. As a user of the directory, you can rate, recommend, 
comment on vendors, products, projects, etc.

An area for developers: this contains project descriptions, links to 
downloads, codelines, information about governance, mailing lists, etc.

Other changes: the site will have the capability to register users. 
Generally, all areas of the site will be accessible without any user 
account, except for areas where you need to write to the site and 
identification is thus necessary. We envisage that we will be able to 
implement single sign-on capability for the new site and at least theXen 
wiki. There will be user profiles that allow you to provide information 
about how you use Xen, but ultimately you only have to provide what you 
are comfortable with. The idea is for example that I can implement 
functionality such as the old community spotlight section by just 
maintaining a list of profile names. Name, pictures, bio, etc. would be 
managed and maintained by you. I am also looking at capabilities, such 
as being able to send newsletters, to registered site users.

*Where I need your input*

**

We will consult you on questions such as look and feel, on a new or 
revamped Xen logo, on new panda's, on navigation, on some of the 
headlines and taglines.

In some areas we do not quite know what you want from Xen.org: e.g. 
should we have a user mailing list, user fora and/or support forum 
functionality similar to stackoverflow? Should we make the developer 
mailing lists accessible via the website?

I also wanted to get views on whether it is OK to require logging into 
the site before you download a Xen or XCP binary. My thinking is that 
this is not good, but that it is OK to ask you nicely to sign in and/or 
create an account before you download. Having some information about its 
users is important to maintain the long term health of an open source 
project: today Xen has very little information about its users. 
Mainly,because we never asked. Providing information is an easy way how 
you can give something back to the community.

Another area where we will consult you is on how we migrate you from 
existing systems to the new one. Is it OK, to migrate existing users to 
the new site (using some kind of opt-out or activation scheme)? Is it 
not, etc.?

Links to feedback sheets, mockups, etc. can be found here: 
http://wiki.xen.org/wiki/New_Xen_Website

Looking forward to hear from you

Best Regards
Lars
**


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