[Sugar-devel] ASLO Suggestion

[Aleksey Lim]

On Tue, Jun 09, 2009 at 09:50:31AM -0500, James Simmons wrote:
> The new style sheet for ASLO reminds me that something has bugged me 
> about the design of the site from the beginning.  The site does not do a 
> good job of showing just how much is available.  When you click on a 
> category you see entries for three or four Activities, seemingly picked 
> at random, and no indication that these Activities are not the only ones 
> available in the category.  Yes, there is a link to show everything in 
> the category.  It's not that you can't find anything if you really want 
> to.  It's that the site doesn't do a good job of selling what it has.
> 
> What I would suggest is to put totals for each category in a prominent 
> place on the page.  When you first come into the site and no category is 
> selected you should see something like "500 Great Activities 
> Available!"  Choose a category like Documents and the line would read 
> "10 Activities In This Category."

In my mind we can do something similar w/o patching upstream code much,
now ASLO does this:

* on the main page it shows 5(6) featured activities in "We Recommended"
  and 3 others in below list
* in category list it shows "We Recommended"(if there are recommended
  activities in this category) and random list of 3 other activities
  in this category

So, we can just increase amount of activities from 3 to 10(or so)
http://dev.sugarlabs.org/ticket/947
and instead of random list show list of featured activities
http://dev.sugarlabs.org/ticket/948

> The other thing that has bugged me is the Recommended Activities.  We 
> need to put more thought into what gets recommended.  Currently one of 
> the Activities that is recommended is Read.  Now an XO owner or SoaS 
> user already has Read, so why recommend it?  Is there some reason I 
> should remove the Read I already have and install this one?
> 
> Recommended Activities should promote Sugar.  They should meet the 
> following criteria:
> 
> 1).  Fairly robust.
> 2).  Not included by default with anything.
> 3).  Should do something interesting.  Think of the iPhone commercials 
> that show all the apps that are available.  Why not recommend something 
> like Food Force or Story Builder?

You are an editor now and can do the best on
http://activities.sugarlabs.org/en-US/editors/featured ;)

And after fixing #948 all featured activities will appear on main page
and per category main pages.

> I also question the category GCompris.  I understand these Activities 
> are related to each other, but the relationship would not be meaningful 
> to a teacher or a student.
fixed

> 
> A little salesmanship could go a long way in making this site better.
> 
> James Simmons
> 

-- 
Aleksey