Time to kick the tires on the new Fedora websites in staging!

So a couple of weeks ago I mentioned the work robyduck and the Fedora websites team have been putting in on the new websites for Fedora, primarily, spins.fedoraproject.org and labs.fedoraproject.org. Here’s the handy little diagram I put together back then to explain:
diagram showing four different fedora sites
This week, robyduck got the new site designs into staging, which means you can try out the new work-in-progress sites right now and provide us your helpful feedback, suggestions (and dare I suggest it) content contributions to make the sites even better. 🙂

labs.fedoraproject.org

Click below to visit the staging site:
Screenshot from 2015-05-07 17:02:39

spins.fedoraproject.org

Click below to visit the staging site:
Screenshot from 2015-05-07 17:02:29
You may notice as you peruse through the Fedora Labs staging site and the Fedora Spins staging site you’re going to see some bogus stuff. For example, the Robotics Suite page highlights Gimp and Inkscape as included applications. 🙂 This is because a lot of the content is filler content and we need help from the users of these spins and experts in the individual technologies of what we should be featuring and how we should be describing these spins.
So this is sort of a continuation of our earlier call for help, but this one is really mostly focused on content – we really need your help.
help-1
With the staging sites for spins.fedoraproject.org and labs.fedoraproject.org up and running, we are hoping this will make it easier for folks to understand where we are lacking content and could use some help figuring out what to say about each spin. It helps to see it all in context for every spin.
This is a good way to contribute to an open source project if you enjoy writing or documentation – we will handle all the details of getting the content into the pages, you would simply need to email us or blog comment (or whatever is easiest for you) the content you are contributing.
If you are interested in helping us out or even have a particular interest in one of the following spins that is in most need of help, can you get in touch with us and we’ll help you get started?

  • Robotics Suite – needs list of featured applications with short descriptions.
  • Security Lab – needs list of featured applications with short descriptions.
  • Sugar on a Stick – needs list of featured applications with short descriptions.

We’d appreciate any help you can provide. Get in touch in the comments to this post!

30 Comments

  1. Anonymous says:

    Hey,
    Great job!
    But having all the stuff with an opacity below 100% at the first glance is not cool IMHO. It’s better to have the complete opacity at the beginning and then lower it while hovering happens instead of having the 25% opacity as default, this way the page won’t look empty when opened and you can still draw the attention to an specific content.
    (and since spins page shows one content per row you can also bind the opacity with scrolling)

    1. mairin says:

      Good catch – I like your suggested changes and agree with them. Will talk it over with robyduck and see if we can do this.

  2. Mike Simms says:

    Very nice improvement to the Spins site layout. I’m a MATE-Compiz spin user so headed to that page to check it out. It seems to flow nicely. I would removed the alternate white/blue background though or go for a more subtle change of colour. It is too divisive and would flow better with less contrast between the two.

  3. Ibrahim says:

    There’s only one flaw I see. On the main pages, the “tiles” are dimmed until you hover over them. This is bad for two reasons: 1- Mobile users can’t hover! 2- It’s hard to quickly read everything.
    I think a better solution would be to have the tiles undimmed by default, then if you hover over one of them, dim the others.
    (That being said, the sites look great)

    1. mairin says:

      Agree with your comments on the dimming; I am going to talk to robyduck about this and see if we can modify it. Thanks!!

  4. Mike Simms says:

    Hi Máirín, I’ve just posted a screenshot tour of MATE-Compiz on my Google+ profile. Feel free to use the images if any are of use. I have customised the desktop layout and theme to my tastes though so not sure they will be much help. Going back to my earlier comment about the site background, I have taken another look today with fresh eyes. I like the layout but that dark blue section is too prominent compared to the rest. I feel it draws attention from the other features described and places too much emphasis on the online features. Please take this as constructive feedback because I really like what you have done with the site in general.
    https://plus.google.com/+MichaelSimmsarehtykitna/posts/1gDA6rCmena

    1. mairin says:

      Hi Mike! Thanks for the screenshot references – we unfortunately need to provide stock screenshots (don’t want a user to pick a desktop based on some nice customizations only to install it and find out it doesn’t look like that. 🙁 ) I’m going to see if maybe we can use a texture or something a little less stark for the dark blue. Thanks for the constructive feedback!

  5. […] Fedory Máirín Duffy zve všechny, aby vyzkoušeli nové stránky Fedory, které jsou momentálně ve fázi přípravy. Skupina Fedora Websites pracuje na několika nových […]

  6. Looks like you have wrong URL on spins page screenshot. It’s http://blog.linuxgrrl.com/2015/05/07/time-to-kick-the-tires-on-the-new-fedora-websites-in-staging/spins.stg.fedoraproject.org instead of spins.stg.fedoraproject.org

    1. mairin says:

      Thanks – got it fixed! WordPress apparently makes the link point to the post if you are missing the ‘http://’ in the a href.

    1. mairin says:

      Thanks for the reference. The comments there unfortunately are for the most part rude and unfair (or at least, completely void of any actionable or constructive points,) and some are made by a person who I have blocked because they stalked / threatened me.

      1. enclair says:

        Hi,
        I’m sorry if some comments have offended you, that was not my intention.
        I don’t understand why the entry point is named getfedora.org and not fedoraproject.org
        That may be good for new users, but for Fedora users it’s bizarre: you don’t download it everyday.

        1. mairin says:

          Oh no, not at all don’t worry about it.
          It’s named getfedora.org because we were modeling after getfirefox.org – also, the old fedora download site was get.fedoraproject.org, and we took a survey and looked at site stats (a long time ago, you can search the blog and see it) and found a lot of pre-existing users were going to get.fedoraproject.org directly to download Fedora when they wanted it.
          As far as for existing users – we felt their primary portal into the Fedora project on an ongoing basis would be start.fedoraproject.org – which is the default homepage configured in Fedora browsers. That links them over to news, support resources, and Fedora Magazine which has active and fresh content specifically targeted for users (vs community member specific content which isnt always very interesting to users.) We felt Fedora Magazine was the best overall place for users to engage with Fedora if they wanted to engage at all (some don’t.)
          For contributors, we have a complex but I think ultimately very good plan that is much better than the status quo, see this blog post for more details on that:
          http://blog.linuxgrrl.com/2015/03/24/enabling-new-contributors-brainstorm-session/

  7. […] Time to kick the tires on the new Fedora websites in staging! […]

  8. Nathan says:

    I especially like that the websites include a large snapshot as the center focus. The link attached to the spins picture is broken.

    1. mairin says:

      Thanks for the bug report 🙂 Fixed it!

  9. Scott Haines says:

    Hi Mairin,
    Would the CloudRouter community project ( https://cloudrouter.org/ ) be a good fit for labs.fedoraproject.org?
    ~ Scott

    1. mairin says:

      Hi Scott! If it’s based on Fedora, it could be if they got the trademark OK to use the Fedora trademark. If not, it’d be considered a remix and be in a different category. I don’t know if we catalog Fedora remixes anywhere – the one I’m aware of is the Raspberry Pi Fedora Remix.

      1. Scott Haines says:

        Thanks, Mairin! You are correct, the CloudRouter spin should fall solely on the remix page. Love the look and feel of the Fedora Labs site, by the way. Nice work!

  10. Iain Brown Douglas says:

    Hi, this is looking really cool.
    A word about section headings on the Sugar on a Stick page. I see “Utilities & Configuration”, “Office & Productivity Suite” and “Education” – it aims to be all education in Sugar and children have little time for utilities and productivity!
    There some work-in-progress suggestions here:
    http://lists.sugarlabs.org/archive/marketing/attachments/20150519/bdaf00ca/attachment.html
    Great work.

    1. mairin says:

      I agree on the headers! I think Peter worked with robyduck and came up with new ones, if you shift-reload you should be able to see them up now:
      http://spins.stg.fedoraproject.org/en/soas/
      Thank you very much for the kind words and feedback!

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