Proposal for status pages layout

What's needed in a Project Status page?

Header/naming stuff

1. A naming convention so that we can tell which pages follow this template?

• How about "FooProject"

2. PageInfo form

• See AboutThePageInfoBox^?

3. Project overview

• 1-3 sentences focusing on immediate goals and scope of project, not details
• Example: WebdavService page has the project overview first before the people section.

Content sections

These first sections could go in any order if they're all short... the intent is to bring the highest-level information (overview, people) and the hottest information (current tasks) to the top, and push details and not-so-up-to-the-minute information further down the page.

1. People Section

• Quick list of people (with optional role)

2. Scheduled Tasks Section

This section only has tasks that are currently scheduled and needed in the current release.

The tasks are formatted as a table, columns with task name/info, status (done flag), milestone target

• The milestone target is the most important column -- it's the plan.
• Task info should be brief but might point to issue pages
• No priority column. -- low priority things shouldn't be on the table of scheduled tasks
• May include Owner column if project has multiple active contributors.
• Err on the side of simple and short (easy to maintain).
• Exact consistency with other tables is valuable but not necessary.

3. References section:

• links to specs, related wiki pages, outside projects

4. Unscheduled tasks section

• Feature ideas, refactoring ideas, issues for the future)
• may be described here, listed here, or link elsewhere
• brevity here is fine

Other optional sections?

• News section (like EmailService)
• History section (like ContentModelProject and WebdavService) - ideally to be kept brief, mostly pointers to historic pages (can archive content off to pages in Journal or Jungle)

-- LisaDusseault - 17 Nov 2004