Cinnamon website

[gustavwiz]

The website for Cinnamon (http://cinnamon.linuxmint.com/) seems very outdated. The latest post is from 2013.

Also, the "Home", "News" and "download" buttons leads to sites under the same domain, but when you click on "Extensions" or "desklets" for example, you suddenly come to http://cinnamon-spices.linuxmint.com, where the navigation bar gets extra padding to the left, which I don't like at all.

Is someone going to get involved and do something about it? Who or which are administrating the site? Right now it seems it just lays there and rots.

[xenopeek]

There is so much to do, and only so many hands to do it all. Clem (Linux Mint founder and project lead) is the maintainer of the websites. There has been some talk about refreshing the look of the websites. I don't know the current status/plans, but if you're a web designer (with a portfolio to show your experience) and you are considering to contribute time to the Linux Mint project, get in contact with the developers. The best way is through IRC (open HexChat from your menu to connect to the Linux Mint IRC channels, then type "/join #linuxmint-dev" to join the developer channel). How to get in contact: http://projects.linuxmint.com/contributing.html

Anyway, the Cinnamon developers generally post news on segfault these days: http://segfault.linuxmint.com/

[davcri]

I always thought that the weakest point of the Linux Mint ecosystem is the look and organization of the websites, for the rest it's one of the greatest distribution with clever developers. I'm very interested in this cause, so I'll try to raise same issue and I'll gladly listen to some feedback.

The websites lack of uniformity: they all look different, and it seems that they are also hosted on different servers (not a real issue for me):

1. http://linuxmint.com/ - hosted on Apache 2.2.9/Debian
   It's ok but It could be better I'm thinking about using a CSS framework with responsive design. I'm just a computer science student, not a designer so I can't speak about colors, fonts, ecc.
2. http://forums.linuxmint.com/ - same host of linuxmint.com
   Not so bad, but it is really old. I only managed a little, private myBB forum and I don't know how hard could be to update this forum (there are also server limits because of the installed PHP version).
3. http://community.linuxmint.com/ - hosted on Apache 2.4.10/Debian
   Honestly I never used it. Developers use github issue system and I think they are overwhelmed by the number of Cinnamon related issues so they have little time to frequent the forum or the community website. Am I wrong ?
4. http://blog.linuxmint.com/ - same host of community.lixnumint.com
5. http://segfault.linuxmint.com - hosted on Apache 2.2.22/Ubuntu
   It's an excellent dev-blog, Wordpress is great.
6. http://projects.linuxmint.com/contributing.html hosted on Github?
   Nice, simple, kind of responsive.

For my humble opinion, there are too many websites and there is no shared navigation bar between them, look at Archlinux that did it in the best way: https://www.archlinux.org/. No matter where you are (forum, wiki,...), you can always go to the top and find the fixed navigation bar with links to the most important pages: Home, wiki, packages, AUR, Bugs, Downloads.
Also the gentoo team did a great job: https://www.gentoo.org/

I really would like to help developers to create a better web application for this wonderful community, I'll join the IRC in the next days. Unfortunately I'm not really experienced with them, I always preferred forums maybe because I'm not a native english speaker.

[gustavwiz]

I totally agree with you, especially the case with http://cinnamon-spices.linuxmint.com, which I described in my first post.

[davcri]

Yesterday I linked this discussion on the IRC but nobody replied Probably they are working hard on the next 17.2 RC.

gustavwiz did you have any web design/programming experience ?
I was thinking about opening a discussion to ask the developers if (and how) we can contribute to a new website.