We urgently need better visibility of docs specifically on getfedora Fedora 36

If you have a look at get fedora, there is at first sight no reference at all to our user documentation.
In the small top bar there is a even smaller select box labeled “Help” and there you find Documentation along with Ask Fedora. This may be very elegant, but practically far too low visibility and help for users.

Instead, I would like to have between the white area with our three editions and the greyish area with “Emerging Fedora Editions” an additional “colourish” area with something like “Find more detailed information how to install and use on our documentation site” and a link.

And additionally, I would like to have the same links to our Server documentation on the Server Download page and the Server Overview Page.

It is a huge waste of our efforts to “hide” documentation as cleverly as we are doing right now.

And because these page have a high number of visitors, it would be a kind of SEO action at the same time and hopefully lower the chance to get our outdated pre Antorra documentation in search results.

So, how can we make this happen for Fedora 36?

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Tag this with websites and #apps as I think the people reading those tags will also be involved in the current revamp effort. I’m not sure on whether the new design incorporates what you’re asking for, @duffy has been involved in some of the design work.

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I’d also suggest filing an issue (or even better, making a pull request!) at https://pagure.io/fedora-web/websites

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Additionally, let’s simplify and perhaps flatten the menu in question. I was going to take a pass at it, but now I have questions:

  • What is the difference between “Documentation” and “Wiki”? I’m technical, and I presume those are the same (or practically, a project has an old Mediawiki instance and is slowly migrating content to a different system that is currently docs…).
  • Are we combining Ask Fedora with this Discussion?

Depending on how we want to direct visitors, we might flatten it to:

Workstation | Server | IoT | Documentation | Community

Thanks for taking on the IA challenges for that page. :slight_smile:

In theory, Documentation (content on docs.fedoraproject.org) is permanent documentation, either for users or contributors, and the Wiki is for temporary collaboration. In practice, that’s not always true, and some content that would be considered documentation is on the wiki. A lot of it has been moved to docs.fedoraproject.org but a lot hasn’t yet.

That’s been discussed (heh), but there aren’t any plans to combine them at the moment.

I added the #websites tag to this post so that the websites team can weigh in as well.

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Let me adjust that a bit: combining them is the plan, but it is a pending plan rather than an active one, because it depends on us upgrading to the Enterprise hosting plan, which in turn kicked up the level of legal agreement which we need to work out, which is in progress.

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Thanks for your insight. :slight_smile:

Given that, perhaps we should not encourage visitors to visit the wiki, instead funneling folks to Documentation and including sidebar/footer info that includes the Wiki as a possible backup for info, but also linking to Ask/Discussion.

The spirit of what I suggest: give fewer, solid links to follow in the primary menus (across the project, really!).

I think, that factually this is not a problem. What is important (not only to me, I hope) is the visibility of the user documentation. Everyone who downloads a Fedora distribution medium should see a link to the corresponding user documentation very clearly right near the download link.

Currently, it is important to get that along with the Fedora 36 release! At this time the pages are visited very often, and this should be noticed by everyone as another novelty. Fedora has a reputation for being technically very good, but documentation is mediocre, patchy and hard to find. And from this then follows: difficult to use, only something for geeks.

And we must not wait for the website revamp for visibility. That is a huge task and will take some time, and that in months. We have to work with the means we have and get results quickly. And the current design is probably no longer modern and fancy, but solid, flexible enough and offers the possibility.

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I concur, and want to say what I said again, but in a less clunky way:

  1. I love docs next to their products; if we have editions/flavors/whatevs, let’s have a relevant documentation link as close to each as possible. :page_facing_up: :link: :slight_smile:
  2. The Documentation site is where I suggest adding links to other parts of the project, so the landing sites are kept relatively simple as to where to direct visitors (such as “Download” and “Documentation”) :floppy_disk: :page_facing_up: :sunglasses:

@pboy if you (or anyone) want to draw up a description of mockup showing where links may go in the current design, I will assist in creating a patch to add them.

I say “assist” because I can probably add them myself, but in case I hit a snag I’ll rely on others help me out. :slight_smile:

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Fully agreed.

I would like to do that very much.

A proposal for https://getfedora.org is to add a “nicely” colored bar (or interim footer) between the white content area with the 3 boxes about the three editions and the title text “Upcomming Fedora Editions” with 2 lines of text:

(a) Something like
Visit Fedora documentation to get additional information how to install and use Fedora (Link: Fedora Documentation :: Fedora Docs)
(b) Someting like
“Ask our friendly and welcoming “Ask Fedora” space to find people to ask any question or problem you may have with your Fedora download” link: https://discussion.fedoraproject.org.

Hopefully someone comes up with a more fancy wording than my German English allows for.

And on

and

I would propose an additional “subfooter” above the current footer saying something like
Visit our Server documentation pages to get additional information about how to get started, how to use, and how to optimize your Fedora Server Edition. (Link: Fedora Server Documentation :: Fedora Docs).
And again the line referencing to discussion.fedoraproject.org

Is that a sufficiently accurate description? Or do you need more?

When we (that is you :slight_smile: ) made that happen, we should as the other editions if they want something alike on their download page.

Fedora 36 is just a week away. How are we doing with our visibility?

Apologies on my part: I’ve just had an employment change, and it’s proving encompassing.

Also, I completely missed this was attached to F36! I honestly thought it was a longer term move, and was going to return to this in a couple of weeks, which obviously won’t work… :grimacing:

(I see it says it in the title when I scroll up, and in the OP. I just never saw it again, sorry)


Thanks for the detailed description, I think I understand your proposal from it. :slight_smile:

On my end, I thought I’d add some button/links to the product cards…

…, or changing the menu items, which is easy for me to decide on and send as a patch.

Adding color bars and sub-menus, as well as text content, is outside what I’m comfortable contributing at the moment.

I’ll take a look at the repo this evening to see what is required to make changes, to familiarize myself with it, but for me to make changes like you’ve proposed I’ll need specific changes to be requested, where I’m not deciding colors or text, for example. :slight_smile:

Thanks, yes, things get lost too quickly in the day-to-day business. It’s a constant battle. We have to pragmatically make the best of it.

That’s fine, too. Unfortunately, Workstation is a difficult example. Currently, there is no documentation at all, unfortunately.

Server documentation is at: Fedora Server Documentation :: Fedora Docs
IoT documentation is at: Welcome :: Fedora Docs

CoreOS and Silverblue have the own special Download page that already include a link to documentation.

I just notice, that IoT already has a “subfooter” with documentation on their download page (The solid foundation for IoT ecosystems | The Fedora Project). Why is that not possible for Server, too? It would be fine just to have the same foot on the server page (with adjusted link addresses, of course). Isn’t that just a matter of copy & paste?

Just as an addendum: A corresponding text & link on the card on getfedora.org is even better because it is much more visible!