Haiku Website: Taking One Little Step Forward

News posted on Sun, 2007-01-21 22:42

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We finally have the long promised new website. It has taken much longer than expected, but hopefully the wait was worth it. I would like to briefly introduce some of the (not so obvious) changes, and try to explain how to make the best of the Haiku website as a tool for the community to contribute to our project.

About Section

  • Haiku Gallery
    For starters, there is now a new Haiku Gallery. The gallery currently has a Haiku Screenshot Tour that gives a good visual overview of what Haiku looks like. We plan to gradually expand the number of screenshots to show various applications running in Haiku, and also use use the gallery to post photos of conferences, presentations and other Haiku related events.
  • Haiku Movies
    There is also a new Haiku Movies page with links to videos on the web showing Haiku. At present, this page lists only a couple of videos, but we would like to expand this list with your help. So, if you know of any Haiku videos on the web that could be added to this list, please drop us a line with the URL, description and author information so that we can add it to the list.
  • FAQs
    The frequently asked questions section has been divided into a General FAQ and a Development FAQ.

Development Section

This section has been slightly changed to make it more compact and focused. We should also note that our Project management and bug/issue tracking system (Trac) is back and that it has a new home at dev.haiku-os.org.

Documents Section

The Documents section has been reorganized into Developer Documents and End User Documents. Each category also has its own subcategories to make it easier to find the kind of document that you are looking for. We will most likely add new document categories as we see fit in the future.

Community Section

  • Haiku Blog-O-Sphere
    We have setup a Haiku Blog-O-Sphere, where the Haiku admins will blog progress reports and other Haiku related posts. This will hopefully give the community a little bit of insight into what the core project members are doing a bit beyond of the commit logs.
  • Community Forums
    The Community Forums have been migrated to the Drupal system. This was a difficult decision (and a bit controversial), but we decided to keep it all under one system, both for consistency of looks and easy of maintenance.
  • Wiki
    Also, as you may have noticed, the wiki has been taken offline. There was too much duplication of content (which we want to avoid), and we would like to repurpose it so that it fulfills a distinct and useful role within the context of our web presence. I hope the community will understand and support this decision.

Other Goodies

At the end of every news post in the front page you will see a few additional icons. As some of you may guess, these allow you to:

  • Bookmark the post on del.icio.us
  • Bookmark the post on Google
  • Digg the post on digg.com
  • Search for the post on Technorati.

This is an easy way to spread the word about Haiku, and help raise its visibility on the web.

If you want an easy way to follow what's going on with Haiku, there are several RSS feeds that you can subscribe to:

As a matter of fact, there are many more pages on the website that have their own syndication feed, which you can easily identify by the icon.

User Accounts

All user accounts were migrated from the old website. If you find that you are unable to login to the new website, please try:

Acknowledgements

The new website was possible thanks to the help of many people. Hopefully, I have not forgotten anyone.

  • Austin Bales, for his valuable ideas.
  • Petter Holt Juliussen, for providing server space at the early stages of development.
  • Gavin James, for his technical help with Drupal.
  • Waldemar Kornewald, for his valuable technical support.
  • Urias McCullough and Curtis Wanner, for helping out with the migration of content.
  • Stephan Assmus, for creating great looking artwork.
  • All the admins, for providing great insight, and for putting up with my marketing rants for the last several months. :-)
  • The Haiku community at large, for their patience.

To finish, I can't emphasize enough the fact that we are a community based project, and that as such, we rely on the contributions of volunteers that want to see Haiku progress. The website is no exception. This new website is just a little step — hopefully in the right direction. Use it as a tool to inform yourself, to interact with other members of the community, and also to promote Haiku. This is just a start: let's make it even better.