Thinking About Design: Fedora Tour Content

Today I did some initial hacking on some design documentation of Fedora-tour. To start out, I have a document describing a -draft- of Fedora-tour’s content descriptions and how the filesystem will be laid out. This is currently in my fedorapeople space, so feel free to

git clone git://fedorapeople.org/~rrix/fedora-tour.git

I’ve filed an Infrastructure ticket[1] to get Fedora-tour properly hosted with Ankur and I as admins on fedorahosted, so hopefully that will help make development a lot more open, and, well, fun 🙂

So, since I really have no official experience in Software Development, much less PROPER software development with design and thought, I thought I would throw this out there and see if anyone had any thoughts and discussion. Ankur’s off having fun at foss.in, so I’ll throw this at him when I see him in IRC. 🙂

Basically, we want the project to be easy to maintain and dead easy for content writers (which can range from SIGs, to the Marketing team, to the Docs team) to add content. To do this, I figure we should have an XML descriptor of what each "package" should contain. In this sense, package is not necessarily an RPM, there could easily be more than one package in a single RPM, just what I named each topic in Fedora-tour on a whim and will change. For example, there would be different sections in the tour:

* What is Fedora Linux

* What is the Fedora Project

* What’s new in Fedora 13?

* Get to know Fedora Desktop Edition

* Get to know Fedora Electronics Lab

etc

etc, each with a tree of topics underneath. The XML files should be simple enough to allow the teams to easily write one up without the Fedora-tour maintainers’ intervention. As a sample and a sort of reference XML I created [2].

So to compliment this, the filesystem layout under /usr/share/fedora-tour/ would contain content directories for each Locale, content-enUS content-ptBR, etc and a directory called packages/ containing these XML.

On launch, the widget which creates this menu will create an objective representation of either each package’s XML or the entire tree (one level up from each package) and use that object to render each page’s contents.

What is everyone’s thoughts on this? Do you see any better way to do this than I am proposing?

Also: Free preview of what Ankur and I have in mind 🙂 The pages underneath each icon would be more traditional HTMl or similar content, but this would be the first form the new user would be exposed to. The tree will probably change, it came from openclipart.

[1] https://fedorahosted.org/fedora-infrastructure/ticket/1855

[2] http://rrix.fedorapeople.org/fedora-tour/sample.xml

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~ by Ryan Rix on 4 December 2009.