I've created a couple of new blocks to help with site navigation:

On the news page there is now a 'Recently updated' block on the right showing all new and changed pages (not just those important enough to show up in the main page). As well as letting you see all new stuff (stories, comments and pages) in one place, this allows us to simplify the main site menu, by removing the need for the 'recent posts' item.

Also, on the software index, the 'Recents comments' block is replaced by 'Popular software' (sorted by total page views).

The new website is nearly ready, but there's one big decision left to make... what shall we call it?

Having 'drupal' in the URLs is a bit silly, as all the URLs will break if we later move to something else (already made that mistake with phpwiki ;-)

Moving it to the top-level could work (e.g. rox.sourceforge.net/ROX-Filer), but there's quite a lot of junk there already which we probably don't want to move in case people are linking to it (we still had rox_filer.php3 linking to the newer rox_filer.html, which redirects to the even-newer phpwiki, which will shortly redirect to drupal... we've been very good at keeping old links valid so far!)

I still sometimes see people complain that something is "only available through Zero Install". The thing is, the packages downloaded by AddApp work just fine on their own. An 'interface file' is just a list of links to tarballs (much like a web page, but machine readable rather than HTML).

But why not make the feeds human readable too? Add some XSLT and they can be! Load this in your browser:

• Sample feed

It looks like a normal HTML page, but if you do View Page Source in your browser, you'll see that it's actually an injector feed file.

You can now choose your language from the my account page. Currently only French and German translations have been imported, but developers can import more translations if people want them.

Frequent software releases are a problem for ROX. The biggest problem is motivation: the person in the best position to make a release is the program's main author. But why would I want to make a release of my own software? I already have the latest version!

Originally, ROX programs (like ROX-Filer) followed the Linux release system of having separate stable and developer branches. So, 1.0.0 was a stable release, then 1.1.0, 1.1.1, 1.1.2 were developer versions. Then, eventually, 1.2.0 would be the next stable release. Theoretically, this should allow you to have one very stable version for normal users.

We've been using phpwiki to manage the ROX web-site since 2003. It has worked pretty well, but it has a few limitations. I'm experimenting with using drupal for the site. Come and have a play!

Some of the advantages:

• Users can leave comments (threaded) on all pages. This is simpler for users than editing the whole page, and also safer.
• We could have web-forums (maybe replacing the rox-users list?)
• Navigation is easier, due to a navigation side-panel.
• The news page looks better and is easier for everyone to use.
• We can define custom page types (e.g. 'Software') with extra fields like version number and author, making the pages more structured.