511001 - [meta] All new planet sites should provide navigation up to larger planets

Status: NEW

(Websites :: planet.mozilla.org, defect)

Description

[Alex Faaborg [:faaborg] (Firefox UX)]

As we are creating new planet sites to aggregate related blog posts (like a Firefox planet and a Firefox UX planet) it would be useful if each site provided some form of navigation to the related higher level planets.  I'm filing this central meta bug so that we can reference it when creating new planets.  The exact higher level planets might sometimes be ambiguous, but here are some examples that seem to make sense:

Planet Mozilla > Firefox
Planet Mozilla > Firefox > UX
Planet Mozilla > Education
Planet Mozilla > Labs
Planet Mozilla > Labs > Ubiquity

So for instance when browsing all posts related to the UX of Firefox, I would be able to navigate to the broader set of Firefox development posts, and to the broadest set (planet.mozilla.org).  The various planets will likely all have different visual designs, so the requirement is just to place this type of breadcrumb trail somewhere on the page. 

(This isn't strictly speaking a planet.mozilla.org bug, but there isn't really any other good component).

Comment 1

[Robert Accettura [:raccettura]]

Are there any stats regarding usage for some of the newer planets?

I'm starting to wonder if this is actually counter productive and just making it harder for people to follow what's going on.  While I'll be the first (and have been for years) saying that pmo is getting hard to keep track, adding several others just seems like it makes it harder for people.

I'll also confess to not even knowing about Planet Education.

This is a good step towards fixing this problem... but still leaves the question: should we be fragmenting and segmenting as opposed to tagging or some other scheme?

This is likely a whole other bug, but just something worth thinking about.

Comment 2

[Mike Beltzner [:beltzner, not reading bugmail]]

There are apparently already bugs on file about this - I believe that this is a duplicate, but Asa or Deb might know more.

My personal feeling is that we are letting the perfect beat the ever living hell out of the good here, and creating solutions for problems that might not exist; we're trying something out in bug 509978 and I've no idea if it'll work. Hopefully it will. If it does, there is absolutely nothing stopping us from evolving and migrating it in a million ways - for example, we could finally set up planet.mozilla.org to have sub-planets or "moons" based on tags. In that case, planet.firefox.com would become planet.mozilla.org/firefox and contain any and all posts tagged firefox ... let's cross that bridge when we come to it, but not before.

Comment 3

[Mike Beltzner [:beltzner, not reading bugmail]]

Ugh, sorry, I misconstrued comment 0, please ignore comment 2.

Making sure we link from sub-planets to the main planet is a good and worthy idea. I thought we were getting into proscribing the domain structure, which was my misread. :(

Comment 4

[David Boswell]

Re comment #0, planet.mozilla.org is not necessarily the broadest set of blog posts, since some of the sub-planets contain posts that aren't carried on PMO.  I don't think this changes anything with this bug, but just pointing out that we might need to make a note somewhere that if you want to follow everything that PMO doesn't contain everything.

Comment 5

[Asa Dotzler [:asa]]

Sorry, why doesn't pmo contain all of the feeds? What belongs in a sub-planet but doesn't belong on pmo? I'm having a hard time thinking of anything.

Comment 6

[Alex Faaborg [:faaborg] (Firefox UX)]

comment #5
>Sorry, why doesn't pmo contain all of the feeds? What belongs in a sub-planet
>but doesn't belong on pmo? I'm having a hard time thinking of anything.

yeah, that seems like a cleaner way to solve the problem, just making sure everything gets added to pmo.

comment #1
>I'm starting to wonder if this is actually counter productive and just making
>it harder for people to follow what's going on.  While I'll be the first (and
>have been for years) saying that pmo is getting hard to keep track, adding
>several others just seems like it makes it harder for people.

This isn't by any means the best possible solution but will probably help.  By linking to the higher level planets hopefully people won't end up totally isolated.  I think it also makes sense to try to extend this to some of our personal blogs as well.  For instance, a lot of the people who read my blog have no idea that Boriss, Limi and Stephen are also blogging about Firefox UX (which limits our ability to get the widest range of feedback), so it would be great for us to give users a clear path to getting the whole channel of UX posts, without forcing everyone to abandon their individually hosted blogs and all aggregate around an overly corporate team blog.

While adding tagging to planet would be great, it doesn't help people discover the existence of planet traveling from the bottom up (assuming they landed on one of our personal blogs from digg or some other news source).

Comment 7

[David Boswell]

Re comment #5, I can't answer why this is, but it isn't hard to scan a sub-planet and find posts that aren't also on PMO.  For instance:

from Planet Mozilla Messaging:
http://blogs.mozillamessaging.com/docs/2009/08/11/thunderbird-and-jetpack/

from Planet Mozilla Education:
http://vocamus.net/dave/?p=614

Asa, you also syndicate to a community blog aggregator but not PMO, so there seems to be a reason why many people feel the need to not post on planet.mozilla.org.