I've been a Slackware user for several years now, I love it, the simplicity, the stability, and all of the reasons I'm sure you've heard before. There are areas of the Slackware experience which I feel could be improved though, and this is aimed at the one area where I feel I can talk with a little experience - the web. The intent of this article is to identify some of the areas in which I think the site at Slackware.com is lacking, and suggest how a new site could deal with these issues.
There's quite a lot to be said for "if it ain't broken, don't fix it", but in the case of http://slackware.com/ I think that there are some significant aims which are not being fullfilled, and for that reason a new implementation should be brought in which would accommodate these aims. Below I've listed the main reasons I see for a new website, any comments on them, or suggestions are welcome.
A big reason to change the site would be to bring all of the "factions" of the Slackware community under one roof. At the moment, there's a few mailing lists, a separate forum, a separate wiki, etcetera. Some people are members of one or two of them, and this leads to some divisions between the different communities, what I would propose is to bring it all under the "slackware.com" label, and have forum.slackware.com, wiki.slackware.com, etc, with a single user account which allows the user to participate in all parts of the community and encourages them to move freely between each segment.
One of the things which would be possible if all of these projects were given a shared overall management is sustained visual coherence between each part of the site. This would mean a single "look and feel" which is ported to every part of the site, the forum, the wiki, a bugzilla. The use of shared visual elements helps to identify the elements as part of a whole, and can help make the site more intuitive as form layouts and the like are shared across the board. At the moment, the forum, the wiki, and the main site all have very different looks, and this is something worth redressing.
With the current implementation, there are very few sources that can be considered "canonical", the website is often left with stale information which is no longer true or relevant and the forums and wiki are unofficial. I would propose bringing the wiki to wiki.slackware.com, and making it the canonical source of information for Slackware. Given a few staff members who would read through additions and to make some of the changes required, this would provide a useful resource for users to reference.
By making an "official" wiki to go with other official areas of the site the amount of duplicate information can be reduced, and the overall quality of the single reference point can be improved.
While the design is pretty clear and functional, and the code allows it to be easily read from a text-based browser it has become fairly "dated" in some ways. The design neither gives the impression of being professional or of being an active community. I would propose keeping the overall clean structure of the site, but updating the graphical elements - obviously this would have to be done by someone with a good measure of talent, and if necessary hiring in a professional would be worth the improved quality.
The navigation on Slackware.com is very simple, but quite long - eighteen links requires some initial parsing by the user, and in some cases there are some slight ambiguities in the links given (for example, when looking for information about Slackware Linux you might think that the "About" link gave that information, this is not the case, that is site/contributor details, Slackware info is in "General info"). I would suggest that if the site were to be redrafted then the number of initial navigation elements could be reduced to a selection of categories, my initial thoughts being something along these lines:
Below is how I would map each of the existing current links to these categories:
With the exception of those marked with a * there is a clear mapping (sometimes to more than one category, but with different parts of each being put in each category) of the existing navigation to a more limited set of links. This means that there is a maximum of nine links with this method (and I expect you could reduce that by at least one), half of those in the existing implementation.
Some sites (in particular opensuse) have gone further with this, but I do not think that it's an example that should be copied, openSuse's site just doesn't have enough in the way of links to quickly navigate to the particular part you're looking for, and doesn't accommodate the community at all.
Slackware.com does not make use of all of the technologies it could. Most notably is the lack of any RSS feeds for things like security advisories or the changelogs. Many people (myself included) would like to subscribe to such a feed, and have any changes appear in an aggregator. This is an example of one of the things which could be remedied in a new site.
A short list of possible additions due to new technologies (and some not so new technologies which the site does not implement) follows:
The current Slackware site does not comply with any web standards, and in fact the code is surprisingly messy. I would propose scrapping the code entirely and building a new semantic and standards compliant site (based on the HTML 4 Strict and CSS standards).
Reference: w3c validation service
The current site contains the most recent news on the front page, and this is a good thing, however if it is to be included the frequency of updates should be upped somewhat, as it stands there is a three year gap between news items displayed on the front page, and this gives the impression that nothing much is happening with Slackware, even when this is not the case. Some obvious additions can be to note any design changes as they happen, current debates about how to move forward, or simply noting that the -current tree is open to the masses again.
Of course, this does not require a new system, but it's worth a section because if this isn't enough to keep regular content flowing onto the site, then it might be worth setting up a developer blog of sorts, this would also do much to dispel the idea that it's all a one man show, and while Pat does take on the majority of the work, there is a community behind it too.
Another advantage of revamping the news would be that you could implement comments (moderation required to be displayed), which would bring new content to the site periodically with minimal effort from the site administrators.
One of the things which would be possible in a new system would be to introduce new development tools open to the users of Slackware, this could include web applications such as a bugzilla (or similar), which can perform bug-submission, tracking, wishlists and the like. This would reduce duplication of reports, and allow the status of each report to be made public quickly as a reference point.
My opinion on all of these points is that at some point in the future, a new site should be developed to replace the existing one, and that the site should aim to improve the community aspect of Slackware's web presence. This would be a ground-up redevelopment, with some expertise required in its construction. Given that we would aim to increase traffic, and add some higher stress applications onto a central server (the forum and wiki for example) it might be necessary to update the hardware at the same time, but that would remain to be seen.
Thanks for reading :-)
I would very much like this to be debated and to have a better idea of what (if anything) should be done result from it, so if you do have any comments which you would like to share with me about this article then please do contact me at alex@alex-elliott.co.uk, or on FreeNode IRC (nick AlexElliott).