[Pdweb] Proposal wrt. guide new users with silk gloves

[Steffen]

I've been thinking about how to best and with less changes to the  
current website make the into-tour to Pd land feel more like trip to  
Bhutan; or Nangijala if you prefer.

My focus was fist to give a more detailed explanation of what  
opportunities there are with respect to getting Pd. The fist easy  
step was to add extra information to the downloads section (and maybe  
rename it to "getting Pd"), but i've fund that it might be better to  
do some more through out chances to the site, which i think will be a  
good solution in the long run.

To be more precise. Instead of expanding the download page, i'd keep  
it simple but serve the info i think is needed (or would be nice to  
have) elsewhere:

The About section, which i'd like to expand into three parts.
1) a slight rewrite of the current about page making it more like the  
wikipedia page on Pd, that is with a few screenshots and feature  
descriptions.
2) some explicit examples that can be downloaded, much like the  
examples on the processing site. This have been discussed before,  
where the conclusion more or less were, that having both a curated  
showroom regularly updated and a more alive share-your-work-section  
on the website would be more desirable then a static example section  
just. I still agree. But i'd rather have a static example section  
then nothing. And it seam more likely that such think cold happen  
then the other. And then it will be more in line with this About  
section, it could use more digestible examples, which would let fx a  
showroom use it's potential to have a more advanced and arty focus.
  3) a page describing the goods in the Pd shop (vanilla, pd- 
extended, devel, externals, abstractions, pddp, etc). This section in  
particular i think new users would benefit from knowing from the  
start. i wish i did.


The documentation section. There will be pointers from that about  
section 3) to appropriate pages or parts of the documentation  
section. Fx. about how to build Pd or externals one self. I think it  
would be nice to have a sub-section of the documentation dedicated to  
building. That is move the general building stuff out of the dev  
section and into the user docs.

Another sub-section i think would be nice to have in the docs  
section, which also relates very much to new users, has to do with  
the ideas Georg roughly expressed in on pd-list about adding info  
about how to load lib in Pd-extended, namely a section about the fist  
steps one would do in the Pd world just after reading the About  
section, having installed it and read the (html) manual. Issues like
- how is the help browser organized
- how do i use other peoples patches, which is much related to
- loading libs or abstractions, or starting Pd
In other word a more pragmatic intro then then one from the manual  
(syntax) and the interactive getting started with the Pd (semantic)  
(and the about section ("what it this at all"?))

I'll stop this here. What i think should be reorganized elsewhere -  
in particular in the docs section - i won't bother you with now.

It would be nice to know what you folks think about these ideas. Fx.  
how does this fit with what the you'd like to see happen?