[Bioc-devel] Distinction between release and devel package websites

[Julian Gehring]

Hi,

Tooltips that appear while hovering over selected links are easy to 
miss.  This alone will likely not be clear enough.  We should convey the 
information that the entire website presents a different version of the 
package.

The idea of a notification box that can be made visible by the 
individual user seems tempting.  One can combine this with an optional 
cookie, to remember the state between browser sessions.

Changing the layout of the devel page itself will also be helpful to 
make the distinction more pronounced.  Hopefully we could approach this 
in a way that maintains the nice design of the bioc website.

Best
Julian


On 21.07.2014 21:50, Hervé Pagès wrote:
> Hi,
>
> In addition to these suggestions, how about using a special background
> color for package landing pages in devel?
>
> Cheers,
> H.
>
> On 07/21/2014 07:32 PM, Michael Lawrence wrote:
>> Or an unobtrusive "notification box" that drops down from the top of the
>> page, saying something like "this is devel"; there would be a dismiss
>> button and a checkbox for whether to show again. The user is free to
>> simply
>> ignore it and proceed as normal.
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> On Mon, Jul 21, 2014 at 7:10 PM, Vincent Carey
>> <stvjc at channing.harvard.edu>
>> wrote:
>>
>>> how about a tooltip that reads "installation via biocLite() is the
>>> recommended approach to Bioconductor software
>>> acquisition, other approaches may lead to inconsistent package-sets"
>>> that
>>> appears when a reader hovers over a tarball.  i would imagine that
>>> this is
>>> how the "wrong package" gets installed, by manually using an
>>> inappropriate
>>> tarball.
>>>
>>> wrong documentation is not so easy but the doc on the devel branch might
>>> have a different tooltip cautioning the readers to be sure they want to
>>> read the doc on the devel version.
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> On Mon, Jul 21, 2014 at 9:39 PM, Julian Gehring <julian.gehring at embl.de>
>>> wrote:
>>>
>>>> Hi,
>>>>
>>>> Can we make the package websites for the devel and release version of a
>>>> package more distinguishable?
>>>>
>>>> To elaborate on this: In the past, I have seen several users having
>>>> problems with using bioconductor because they ended up on the wrong
>>>> page
>>>> (mostly the devel page when they would have needed the release).  This
>>>> resulted in getting the wrong documentation or installing the wrong
>>>> package.  The pages are well designed, and there is no reason to change
>>>> this.  However, the websites for the devel and release version of a
>>> package
>>>> look almost identical, and that these two get confused seems to
>>>> happen to
>>>> many users (me included).
>>>>
>>>> If you search for a package within the bioc website, the release
>>>> version
>>>> always comes first in the search results.  If you are coming from the
>>>> outside (e.g. google), this may not be the case.  In fact, googling
>>>> a few
>>>> packages names often returned only the devel page in the top 10 search
>>>> results.
>>>>
>>>> What are the feelings regarding this? We could add a header section on
>>> the
>>>> devel page that states that this is an unstable version not meant to be
>>>> used in production settings, and provide a link to the respective
>>>> release
>>>> version?
>>>>
>>>> Best wishes
>>>> Julian
>>>>
>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>> Bioc-devel at r-project.org mailing list
>>>> https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/bioc-devel
>>>>
>>>
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