TR - Late in 2006 I decided to help the Tcl community to relaunch/improve/overhaul (or whatever you call it) the http://www.tcl.tk site. I was tired of all this marketing talk and nothing being done about it. So here I am, starting work slowly but continuously.
Original post
My original announcement for this task was posted in this thread about "Finding a niche for Tcl":
http://groups.google.de/group/comp.lang.tcl/browse_frm/thread/98ec976d58b75c86/e7eb63b0b9993e81
The plan
On the site http://tcl.typoscriptics.de/portal you will always find the current status of the new Tcl portal. My plan is to ...
- Get all content from the original site over to the new one
- Look for a good design (the current is just a placeholder at the moment)
- Add more content, links and the like and update the site with news on a regular basis
Current status
I am in phase 1 now collecting and reorganizing content from www.tcl.tk. Any time I see something interesting, I add a placeholder to the new site so I can remember what to add in phase 3.
(pages in parentheses are not yet transferred)
- Home page is transferred
- about/ is transferred
- about/highlights.html grabbed (needs revision)
- (about/uses.html)
- (about/audience.html)
- about/features.html grabbed (needs revision, same page as: advocacy/top10.html and advocacy/whytcl.html)
- about/compare.html grabbed (needs thorough revision, same page as: advocacy/choose.html and advocacy/whyscript.html)
- about/language.html grabbed (needs revision, same page as: scripting/syntax.html)
- software/tcltk/license.html grabbed
- about/support.html grabbed
- about/history.html is transferred
- (about/dos2unix.html) (same page as: scripting/lesson1.html)
- (about/netserver.html) (same page as: scripting/netserver.html)
- scripting/primer.html grabbed (needs revision)
- (customers/) (same page as about/audience.html)
- (customers/success/) (same page as about/uses.html)
- (customers/success/AOLcase.html) (page gone, redirected to home page)
- (customers/success/webcontent.html) (page gone, redirected to home page)
- (customers/success/netmanage.html) (page gone, redirected to home page)
- (customers/success/testautomation.html) (page gone, redirected to home page)
- (customers/success/edacad.html) (page gone, redirected to home page)
- (customers/success/other.html) (page gone, redirected to home page)
- (advocacy/perl.html) (page seems to not exist)
- (advocacy/xml.html) (page seems not to exist)
- (software/)
- (software/tcltk/)
- (software/tclpro/)
- (software/tclpro/debugger.html)
- (software/tclpro/checker.html)
- (software/tclpro/compiler.html)
- (software/tclpro/wrapper.html)
- (software/tclpro/eval/)
- (software/tclpro/support/faq.html)
- (software/tclpro/doc/)
- (software/tclpro/support/index.html)
- (software/plugin/)
- (software/plugin/download.html)
- (software/plugin/faq.html)
- (software/plugin/applets.html)
- (software/plugin/external.html)
- (resource/software/ports/)
- (software/java/)
- (software/java/download.html)
- (software/java/new_features.html)
- (software/java/faq.html)
- (man/java1.2.6/contents.html)
- (resource/software/applications/)
- (resource/software/applications/editor/)
- (resource/software/applications/email/)
- (resource/software/applications/graphics/)
- (resource/software/applications/irc/)
- (resource/software/applications/personal/)
- (resource/software/applications/misc/)
- (resource/software/extensions/)
- (resource/software/extensions/database/)
- (resource/software/extensions/expect/)
- (resource/software/extensions/macintosh/)
- (resource/software/extensions/network/)
- (resource/software/extensions/objects/)
- (resource/software/extensions/tk/)
- (resource/software/extensions/windows/)
- (resource/software/extensions/misc/)
- (resource/software/tools/)
- (resource/software/tools/development/)
- (resource/software/tools/guibuilder/)
- (resource/software/tools/plugin/)
- (resource/software/tools/www/)
- (resource/software/tools/xml/)
- (resource/software/tools/misc/)
- (software/tcltk/netcvs.html)
- (doc/)
- (resource/doc/books/)
- (resource/doc/faq/)
- (man/)
- (resource/doc/start)
- (doc/white.html)
- (doc/scripting.html)
- (doc/integration.html)
- (doc/compiler.html)
- (doc/tclHistory.html)
- (doc/scriptHistory.html)
- (doc/Y2K.html)
- (doc/howto/")
- (doc/howto/probuild.html)
- (doc/howto/wrap.html)
- (doc/howto/compile.html)
- (doc/howto/stubs.html)
- (doc/howto/thread_model.html)
- (doc/howto/winext.html)
- (doc/howto/regexp81.tml)
- (doc/howto/i18n.html)
- (doc/tea/)
- (community/)
- (community/news.html)
- (community/features/)
- (community/features/Xconq.html)
- (community/features/webbuilding.html)
- (community/features/intelliclaim.html)
- (community/features/infocoll.html)
- (community/features/millionare.html)
- (community/features/tclkit.html)
- (community/features/familypractice.html)
- (community/features/ashley.html)
- (resource/community/people/)
- (resource/community/websites/)
- (community/tcl2005/)
- (resource/)
- (live/bydate)
- (forms/urlnote.html)
- (live/keyword)
To do
- incorporate text from TCL Elevator Pitch
- on the page about SQLite, refer to the book "The Definitive Guide to SQLite" [L1 ]
- link to tclhelp.net
- find a good place for platform-specifi things (other than the link on the page Software->Extensions), e.g. COM interaction on Windows (tcom,optcl, ...)
- provide a good way to make old pages (and their URLs) refer/link to the new updated content, so there are no "missing link"/404 messages
- add a link to nightly-build for many, many recent tar balls of Tcl/Tk and packages: ftp://ftp.tcl.tk/pub/tcl/nightly-cvs/
- add pointer to th Tcl Portable Runtime Library, to emphasize the portability of Tcl and Tcl-C code (Tcl as a C library)
- add a link to the central syntax pages on the wiki (from the manual pages page) where additional info can be found: Tcl syntax help and Tk syntax help
Can you help?
Yes you can. Provide content, stories, news, ...! I have already received some content (a tutorial) from Arjen Markus and an offer from the makers of the Tcl-URL! to help me trasnferring the weekly news to the site.
Comments
EKB Your new design is easier to navigate thatn www.tcl.tk. I look forward to seeing more. (Although I'm not crazy about the layout. It's too "Wordpress"-like for me, and I'm glad that at step 2 in your plan you're looking at designs. Maybe take a look at CSS Zen Garden for inspiration? [L2 ])
TR I know Zen Garden and many of these layouts are really beautiful. As the plan is, the focus is on content alone now. The current layout is a placeholder only, so people can see the content being added. When all content is there, I will switch focus to the layout and I think there will be lots to discuss then.
EKB Sounds like a good plan!
On another note, I think you could quickly fill in your Tcl/Tk placeholders for "hello, world":
puts "Hello, World!"
and
pack [label .l -text "Hello, World!"]
TR True. I was planning something like this. It needs a short introductory text, though. Maybe I'll take some from the wiki ... EKB Yes, in fact, there's a whole The Hello World program as implemented in Tcl/Tk page.
EKB One more comment. If you used the same type size on all the pages (home page & others), then the user could set the type size that's comfortable for them. My 2 1/2 cents.
TR This may be due to my ignorance on layout right now. I will look into this. Thanks for your comments! EKB No problem! Actually, truth be told, the last one was from my spouse, who is a graphic designer. She gave me permission to pretend it was my idea :-D
tjk You might add a link to the tkchat page to the the related links for Core Team. TR Done! Thanks for the hint.
chrisjl - Forgive me if this is already part of the plan, but I'd hate to see you complete this daunting task without me making this point. I hope part of the intended process is to change the URLs to reflect the page content. e.g. Documentation -> Tutorials is currently accessed as the highly forgettable page3/page10/page10.html - I'd much rather be able to tell people to visit www.tcl.tk/docs/tutorials (note the absence of an actual file name in that URL). TR I can assure you, this is part of the plan. The current page names are generated by the web software I am using and as long as I collect content and organize it, I will leave it like that. When all content is there, the names will be changed to something more reasonable :-)
LV 2007 Oct 25 The first thing I noticed was the typo in the <head> of the first page - it says Tck instead of Tcl ... TR: Whoops, how could that one stay for so long without being noticed ... corrected now, thanks!
LV Home page needs updated - the tcl/tk conference is over now. Also, ActiveTcl 8.4.16.0 is available now. Probably a new version of the 8.5 beta is available as well. (TR - Right. This was when I first took the content. I will update this type of content when I see it during my edits. It's about getting content now, keeping it updated comes next.) Also, what is the difference between transferred and grabbed? (TR - Well, none. Originally, 'grabbed' were pages taken over without modifications, and 'transferred' were pages with modifications. But this distinction is no longer true.) And the difference between entries in (parens) and those not? (TR - this is explained in the text above the long pages list: pages in parens are those not transferred/grabbed yet.)