Nice project web sites

From WhyNotWiki

Not strictly limited to project sites. Basically anything that's not a personal site. Company sites/blogs, for example, would also (currently) go here.

[edit] Ethereal/Wireshark

[edit] Download page

http://www.ethereal.com/download.html

I like how they show multiple download options in a pretty intuitive and concise manner: a main download link (nice icon) "or" [select a mirror from a dropdown] "or" SourceForge.

[edit] Patent Commons

http://www.patent-commons.org/

[edit] Openads

http://www.openads.org/

The whole site has a nice, clean, organized feel to it -- not just the home page. Nice use of colors. Nice simple tour, but with links to the demo site or the extensive documentation if you want more.

[edit] OpenPrinting

I thought their home page was very informative. Maybe it's just the fact that the information on the site is so useful, but I think their nicely organized home page might have helped too.

http://www.linux-foundation.org/en/OpenPrinting. Retrieved on 2007-05-11 11:18.

They have these major sections:

OpenPrinting: Overview of site...

Many, many links included within the paragraphs (inline links). Takes a big site and makes it more manageable/accessible to the average visitor by providing links to many of the most used/useful sections of the site.

"Looking for configuration or driver help? "

Try our CUPS Quick Start

or look for your printer in the OpenPrinting Database.

For more detail, try Till's Tutorial.

If all else fails, ask a human in the forums.

"Researching a printer purchase?"

Start with suggested printers,

or browse our database.

"Looking for software?"

We host Foomatic,

printer driver packages,

and some other programs.

"Want to help?"

Here's how.

Make distribution-independent printer driver packages with the LSB DDK! [For developers]

Announcements/News

For Developers

The Goal

How the goal is achieved

[edit] http://capify.org/

A nice clean and simple site. Happy colors. Doesn't feel cluttered.

[edit]

http://activereload.net/ "Active Reload: We build web applications"

http://warehouseapp.com/ "Warehouse — Subversion Browser"

I like their background image (on both sites) -- it's nice and textured, not just a plain flat color -- gives the page a bit of warmth and liveness.

http://lighthouseapp.com/ Lighthouse: Simple hosted Issue tracking, bug tracking, and project management software.

[edit] Mono

http://www.mono-project.com/Moonlight Moonlight , http://www.mono-project.com/SVN

Very graphically pretty
The top navigation/heading area especially:
- Nice logo
- Main links are "start", "use", "contribute", and "need help" -- rollover effect is attractive
- Another box with "screenshots", "manuals & docs", "download now", and "blogs" (each of these has an icon)
- Asymmetrical wavy green line instead of the usual symmetrical, blocky look
[Powered by MediaWiki (category)] -- I wouldn't have been able to tell! (The usual edit, talk, log-in, etc. links are absent. I take that back -- it has a "Create an account or log in" link at the bottom.)

[edit] Git

http://git.or.cz/

Very simple, but very clean and attractive. I like.

http://git.or.cz/course/svn.html

[edit] Mozilla Developer Center

http://developer.mozilla.org/en/docs/Main_Page

[Powered by MediaWiki (category)]

[edit] dokuwiki

http://wiki.splitbrain.org/wiki:dokuwiki

Organized well into sections with bullet points:

About DokuWiki

   *
     A feature list :!:
   *
     Happy Users
   *
     Who wrote about it
   *
     What Bloggers think
   *
     Compare it with other wiki software

Installing DokuWiki

   *
     System Requirements
   *
     Download DokuWiki :!:
   *
     Change Log
   *
     How to install or upgrade :!:
   *
     Configuration

Using DokuWiki

   *
     Wiki Syntax
   *
     The manual :!:
   *
     Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)
   *
     Glossary
   *
     Search for DokuWiki help and documentation

Customizing DokuWiki

   *
     Tips and Tricks
   *
     How to create and use templates
   *
     Installing plugins
   *
     Development Resources

DokuWiki Feedback and Community

   *
     Join the mailing list :!:
   *
     Check out the user forum
   *
     Talk to other users in the IRC channel
   *
     Submit bugs and feature wishes
   *
     Share your experiences in the WikiMatrix forum
   *
     Some humble thanks

Multi-lingual

[edit] dev-utils

http://dev-utils.rubyforge.org/ The Ruby dev-utils Project

Pretty well organized. Sections:

Internet Links
Installation Instructions
Administrivia

In the header, it says require 'dev-utils' -- which I think is a neat marketing trick to subconsciously remind people how easy it is to start using this library (just require that file and you're good to go).

[edit] F-Spot

Clean and attractive
Dark background frames the white content area rather well
[Powered by MediaWiki (category)]

[edit] schemamania.org

This project site isn't great because of any design-related niceness. Rather, I like it because of its very nice prose. The candor and openness of the author is also very exemplary.

[edit] Examples of good writing (c)

Specifically: nice prose (c).

http://www.schemamania.org/schemamania/. Retrieved on 2007-05-11 11:18.

Schema Mania is a place for people who like (or need, or are just good at) database designs. It's completely non-profit, dependent on the enthusiasm of its visitors and the talent of its contributors.

...

Schema Mania was conceived as a repository of database designs. You'd be able to come here, browse for a database design in your "problem space". With luck, you'd find something at least similar to what you had in mind. You'd download it, adapt it to your needs, and be happy. www.schemamania.org would be a web of database designs, if you will.

But, a funny thing happened on the way to the forum. Much of the technology that Schema Mania needs is not ready for general use. What's available is nascent; the rest is missing. However valuable the concept might be, Schema Mania lacks both software and standards. It thus became part of Schema Mania's goal to bring together people of various disciplines, to help them find each other and create better tools.

...

Pictures are, as Confucius never said, worth a thousand words in this regard. A picture of a database is very helpful for human beings who want to understand the design. For implementation, though, we need a way to communicate the picture to the database. Later on (or, sometimes, earlier on), it's nice to have a way to convert existing database designs into pictures. We need, in other words, an intelligent picture, one that can be created from words and converted to words. We need it, but it doesn't exist. Not yet, not quite.

It's hardly news that file formats for pictures abound on the web. JPEG, PNG, you name it, the web does graphics. What these formats have in common is that they treat the picture as a block of dots. To the extent that they can be said to contain information, that information is only useful to the program that displays the picture. They are to intelligent diagrams as a fax is to email: Understandable and useful to the human being, but intractable, just a blob of dots.

...

The great thing about standards, as some wag said, is that there are so many to pick from. Pictures have not stopped at the blob-of-dots dead end. The W3C developed Scalar Vector Graphics (SVG), an XML derivative. And there's a little-heralded part of the Gnome Office called Dia. [...] Dia shapes can be described with SVG, and the whole Dia diagram is stored as XML according to a freely available DTD. In a market defined as "free software to create diagrams stored in a published XML format", Dia is alone. It has no competition.

Dia is short for "Diagram". [...] A blob of dots it's certainly not. Dia makes intelligent pictures.

...

For Schema Mania to become what it was conceived as, Dia (or something like it, but there is nothing else like it) is a sine qua non. But Dia needs more database intelligence, and it needs more and better conversion tools. In a bootstrappy way, it became Schema Mania's immediate purpose to do what it can to facilitate these events, to convert hope into reality.

Schema Mania aims to coordinate links and information about the disparate efforts to bring Dia to databases. If you know of such an effort, send me a link and a note about what you think about it. I'll add it to the collection.

...

By the way, "databases" means relational databases. [...] At this point in the history of technology, relational databases are widespread, well-understood, entrenched, and unchallenged. The envisioned population of Schema Maniacs have relational designs to use and share. No offense intended to enthusiasts of more enlightened database architectures.

...

Because XMI can hold information about object models generally, it's a bit heavyweight for holding simple relational models. But it might suit our purpose.

...

About the author. Not much to say, really. If you know me, you might find my helter-skelter home page handy (or not). By day I work as a quantitative analyst; Schema Mania is strictly a hobby. Well, it's also a passion, because hobbies should be passions, after all.

[edit] Locus Focus: RAM

http://locusfoc.us/ram Locus Focus — RAM : Vision is where you look for it.

Different icons for "new features" and "bug fixes"; these are used as the bullet symbol for bulleted lists
Pull quotes: Quite round and organic; and it appears to come out of not just the guy's name but also his photo

[edit] script.aculo.us

[Pretty designs (category)]

http://script.aculo.us/

They have a very different design from most sites. Most sites use rectangles (with rounded corners if you're lucky); they use circles! Scandalous.

[edit] Videolan's Wiki

[Wiki-based (category)][Pretty designs (category)]

Various boxes, like Wikipedia portal sites
- 2 wide boxes at top
- 3 vertical boxes below that
Each box is a different color -- pleasant pastel colors

[edit] http://geminstaller.rubyforge.org/index.html

Very well documented. Very complete.

Could be organized a bit better, but is decently so...

[edit] Semantic MediaWiki

[Well organized (category)]

Sections (boxes):

Introduction (big box)
- Scope of the project
- The Semantic MediaWiki extension
Current participants [Not sure why this is important to have on the front page]
News and events
Where we are now
- Problem statement
- Related work
- Background: Ontologies and the Semantic Web
What we want
- Overall goals
- Requirements
- Envisaged applications
How we plan to do it
Project phase

They really try to involve people; they ask for your ideas, what requirements you consider important

[edit] http://wordpress.org/

Clean and attractive
Compelling marketing claims. ("state-of-the-art semantic personal publishing platform with a focus on aesthetics, web standards, and usability")
Organization: "Welcome" and "Welcome Back" sections
Categories idea appears to be copied from MediaWiki (f.e., http://codex.wordpress.org/Category:Getting_Started)

[edit] http://plone.org/ plone.org

Very clean and attractive
Images
Boxes
Vertical lines

[edit] http://www.aptana.com/docs/index.php/Main_Page Aptana

[Powered by MediaWiki (category)]

[edit] http://pastebin.com/pastebin.php?help=1

I like how it answers all of these questions that people are likely to have -- all on one page even!

What is pastebin?
And this is all free?
Can I get the source?
I have some feedback, who do I contact?

[edit] wiki.pluginaweek.org

http://wiki.pluginaweek.org/Main_Page

Welcome to wiki.pluginaweek.org

The Community PluginAWeek Documentation Project

[edit] What am I doing here?

Well, our best guess is that you're looking for more information on our plugins or want to contribute some caveats, tricks, or other related information. If that's the case, then you're at the right place (if it's not, check out our blog and go from there). If you want to contribute to the wiki, please first sign up for an account. Also, make sure you search for the information before adding it to the wiki. It may be that someone else has already contributed the same information, but it hasn't been categorized correctly yet.

[edit] So where to go from here?

We've categorized each released plugin based on the component that it uses/affects. If you can't find a certain plugin, you can either look in the "Miscellaneous" categories or use the search on the left. Note: Unreleased plugins will not be documented anywhere on the PluginAWeek wiki/blog/trac (unless you're sneaky ;)).

For a summary of every plugin that has been released so far, see Plugin Summaries.

For a more complete listing of everything available in this wiki, you can browse all of the categories or pages.

Comments:

Tells the user what they might be interested in, what they can do on this wiki...
Pretty organized
There's a nice list of categories floated to the right of the page...
Overall, though, ironically, I find the site kind of hard to navigate