Category: Websites

A new conceptual model for Fedora

Fedora / Websites2 Comments

Fedora’s web presence today It’s no news now that Fedora has a new logo, and what you may not realize is that we do not have a new website – when we began the new logo rollout process, we simply updated the logo in-place on our pre-existing website. The thing is – and this is regardless of the underlying code or framework under-girding the website, which I have no issues with – the messaging and content on the current getfedora.org website has not kept pace with the developments, goals, and general narrative of the Fedora project. We have a lot of different initiatives, developments, and collaborations happening at what I find at times is a dizzying pace that is challenging to keep up with. The number of different fronts that Fedora development takes place on and the low, technical level they occur at makes it difficult to understand the big picture of what exactly Fedora is, and why and how would one want to use it. As part of the Fedora rebranding project, I’ve been worrying for a while how we will evolve our web site and our overall web presence. If we’re honest, I’ve been worrying about it quite …

Fedora Atomic Logo Idea

Fedora / Logo Design / Websites24 Comments

The Fedora Cloud Working Group recently decided that in Fedora 24 (or perhaps a bit further out depending on how the tooling/process can support it) that the Atomic version of Fedora is going to be the primary focus of the working group. (Background discussion on their list is available too.) This has an affect on the Fedora website as the Fedora Cloud edition shifts from a buffet of kind of equally-positioned cloud- and container-related images to a more focused set of images optimized for container hosting (using Atomic) and a set of more clearly ancillary images that are also useful for cloud/container deployment of Fedora that aren’t based on the Atomic platform. We need to position these images accordingly on the website to meet the new model. Matthew Miller and I discussed how the Cloud WG decision might effect the website and ideas for how we could update the website to suit for Fedora 24. One idea for how we could do this: Consider replacing the “Cloud” edition slot on the front of getfedora.org with a Fedora “Atomic” edition brand. Convert getfedora.org/cloud to focus instead solely on Atomic (maybe redoing the URL to getfedora.org/atomic). Build out a separate cloud image …

Fedora Developer Website Design

Fedora / Fedora.next / Websites4 Comments

For the past few weeks I have been working on mockups and the HTML/CSS for a new Fedora website, the Fedora Developer portal (likely to eventually live at developers.fedoraproject.org.) The goal of the site is to provide resources and information to developers building things on Fedora (not primarily developers contributing to Fedora itself.) A bunch of folks have been contributing content to the site, and Adam Šamalík and Petr Hracek set up the initial first-cut prototype of the site, configuring jekyll to generate the site and building out the basic framework of the site. The prototype was shared with the Fedora Environment and Stacks Working Group mailing list, and after some feedback and iteration on the initial prototype, Petr asked me to take a look at the overall UX / design of the site. So that’s how I came to be involved here. 🙂 Competitive Analysis and Sitemap First, to better understand the space this site is in, I took a look at various developer sites for all sorts of OS platforms and took in the sorts of information they provided and how they organized it. I looked at: Red Hat Developers – main nav is streamlined – solutions, products, …

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

Fedora / Websites30 Comments

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: 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: spins.fedoraproject.org Click below to visit the staging site: 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 …

Do you know robotics?

Fedora / Websites8 Comments

Hi 🙂 Plea for help here 🙂 The websites team and I would like to feature a photo of some real robots that have been programmed and/or built using Fedora as the main banner image for the Fedora Robotics spin – but we don’t know of any specific Fedora robots. We’d even be happy with a picture of a non-Fedora robot at this point. If you know someone who is knowledgable about robotics and/or Fedora robotics, and who may have a picture they’d be willing to let us use, can you please get in touch? Thanks 🙂

Redesign of spins.fedoraproject.org; Help make your spin rock!

Fedora / Websites14 Comments

Robyduck and I have been working on a total revamp of spins.fedoraproject.org. Behold, what spins.fpo looks like today: Different kinds of spins So one issue we have with spins is that there are different *kinds* of spins: Desktop Spins There are desktop spins that each feature a different desktop environment on top of Fedora. While you can install multiple desktop environments by default, most people stick to one most of the time, and you certainly can’t use more than one in a given session. These spins are much more about the environment you use Fedora in rather than applications layered on top. Functional Spins There are functional spins that consist of application bundles and configuration that you could honestly package-group install on any desktop and be able to use productively – Games, Design Suite, Robotics, etc. They are more purpose-directed than the desktop spins, which are more for general computing environments. ARM builds (These aren’t actually spins but fell into the fray as they needed a home too!) Now that ARM is a top-level / supported architecture, we have ARM builds for many versions of Fedora. These images are solely architecture-based and cater to a very specific community and very …

Enabling New Contributors Brainstorm Session

Fedora / Fedora Hubs / Websites8 Comments

You (probably don’t, but) may remember an idea I posted about a while back when we were just starting to plan out how to reconfigure Fedora’s websites for Fedora.next. I called the idea “Fedora Hubs.” Some Backstory The point behind the idea was to provide a space specifically for Fedora contributors that was separate from the user space, and to make it easier for folks who are non-packager contributors to Fedora to collaborate by providing them explicit tools to do that. Tools for folks working in docs, marketing, design, ambassadors, etc., to help enable those teams and also make it easier for them to bring new contributors on-board. (I’ve onboarded 3 or 4 people in the past 3 months and it still ain’t easy! It’s easy for contributors to forget how convoluted it can be since we all did it once and likely a long time ago.) Well, anyway, that hubs idea blog post was actually almost a year ago, and while we have a new Fedora project website, we still don’t have a super-solid plan for building out the Fedora hub site, which is meant to be a central place for Fedora contributors to work together: The elevator pitch …

Get involved in the Fedora.next web efforts!

Fedora / Fedora Design Team / Fedora.next / Websites8 Comments

Lately I’ve been blogging about the proposal for new Fedora websites to account for the Fedora.next effort. So far, the proposal has been met with warm reception and excitement! (Yay!) We Really Would Love Your Help Two very important things that I’d like to make clear at this point: This plan is not set in stone. It’s very sketchy, and needs more refinement and ideas. There is most certainly room to join in and contribute to the plan! Things are still quite flexible; we’re still in the early stages! We would love your help! I know this usually goes without saying in FLOSS, but I still think it is worth saying. We would love more folks – with any skillset – to help us figure this out and make this new web presence for Fedora happen! Are you interested in helping out? Or perhaps you’d just like to play around with our assets – no strings attached – for fun, or follow along on the progress at a lower level than just reading these blog posts? Let’s talk about where the action is happening so you can get in on it! 🙂 How To Get Involved Up until this point, …

A proposal for Fedora's website (considering Fedora.next)

Fedora / Fedora Hubs / Interaction Design Work / Websites10 Comments

(I’d like to apologize upfront, in that I meant to post this about a month or so ago. You might be aware that the Red Hat Summit is coming up in 2 weeks, and I’ve had a few odds and ends to take care of for that event that cut to the front of the line on my task list because of their imminent deadlines!) So, Fedora.next is shaking Fedora up a bit – enough that our current fedoraproject.org website is going to need a bit of a gut reno to appropriately reflect the new world of Fedora! A few weeks back, Ryan Lerch and I had an informal brainstorming session about how to account for Fedora.next with fedoraproject.org. We came up with what we thought was a pretty workable concept, and met with Matthew Miller a few days later to see what he thought. Here’s the whiteboard of what we came up with: Whoah, what’s going on here? Okay, let’s walk through this. The Proposal There’s several website components to this proposal. We’ll go through each one-by-one. We have some thumbnail mockups of each site to give you a vague idea of the kind of thing we’re thinking of …