I’ve added some new tools and features to the OSLC website. We want to make it easier to discuss OSLC, find content, and add more points of view to the site.
Let's dive in.
New forums for public discussions
We’ve added forums to the site. Go take a look! If you've got a question or anything that you want to see discussed publicly, post away.
To sign up, head to this page to register.
I've started us off with a few basic forums:
- Basic Question & Answer – Just have a general question about OSLC or our community? Post it here.
- Community news – Have something that the community might be interested in? Let us know!
- Discussing blog posts – More on this in a moment.
- Meta – A place to discuss this website (including the forums, wiki, and mailing lists).
- Discussing specifications – Most of the work for specifications will be happening in our mailing lists and on the wiki, but if you'd like to start a public discussion about a specification, feel free to do so. We also have a board for proposing new specifications or workgroups if you'd like to get some feedback on an idea.
- OSLC sofware – A place to discuss implentations of our specifications.
Of particular interest might be this FAQ that discusses (among other things) becoming a moderator or requesting new forums. I've also got a little rundown of the text formatting for posts if you want to get fancy.
A simple Blog replaces the News page
We have a blog now in place of our old News page. (You'll automatically be redirected there, but you should update your bookmarks.)
I've ported over every old news post. Now every post has (and will have) a permanent, stand-alone URL, which will make it easier to share posts with others. (This is a useful and obvious advancement over our old system of "Go to the news page and keep scrolling".)
Speaking of sharing, at the bottom of each post you'll find the usual collection of buttons to share a news post on the big social networks. If you like what you're seeing, do spread the word.
To bring a little order to the chaos, we can now organize posts by OSLC workgroups and with tags: for a taste, here's all the posts that have something to do with the Change Management workgroup and all the posts about Eclipse Lyo.
I've passed on a traditional commenting system, but you can discuss blog posts in the forums. We can associate a blog entry with a forum thread, so if someone's already started a conversation in the forum you'll see a link to that thread right here.
In the future, we'll be opening the blog up to multiple authors so you'll start seeing a variety of voices around here with different types of content.
Oh, and for you RSS lovers, there's an RSS feed for new blog posts to keep you updated.
The tutorial and primer have new URLs
I've built a framework for managing our multi-page tutorials, which makes it easier for me to maintain, organize, and update our existing tutorial and primer. The drawback is that to do so I had to move them to new URLs.
The new links are on the Resources page, and if you access either of them with an old bookmark, I've done my best to redirect you to the right place (including if you bookmarked something like /primer/#query_mechanisms with an anchor in the URL).
Every individual page now has its own URL, which is good for bookmarking something and also vastly better for people coming to this site via search engines. In the past, you would get a search hit on the tutorial and then have to fish through the entire document page-by-page to find the term that you searched for. Not ideal.
Other new(-ish) pages
If you haven't been here in a while, over the past month or two I've added new pages including big lists of resources about OSLC, a list with our current specifications, a page that for software that implements OSLC specifications, and a list of member organizations.
All of these are of course living documents; if you see something missing or wrong, let me know.
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Forum