Hi Ian,
yes
dog fooding is a pretty useful motivator!
I'll address each of your good feedback points (plus a few thrown in from other people).
Many people are comfortable with 90s website design(including me), and there's work in progress to create this too as the lofi version. Very much like the existing website (which still functions now).
Finding documentation. Yes, this needs to be improved. If you search for "documentation" it's the first result. If you go the the "learn" section the Documentation link is there, however a lot of other things are taking up space. I think I'll bold the documentation link there. (or someone else feel free to change it in the wiki). If you type pygame docs in your location bar of your browser you get there. Knowing how many people go directly to the documentation of pygame rather than through the website, I know for sure this is how people get there. A "
getting started" section is something I've been thinking about quite a bit, and have designs and drawings for. This contains most of your getting started stuff. Like documentation and installation. When thinking on how to do the new downloads page 'Downloading' things is not how people should be getting started with pygame... mostly. pip install, apt-get install.
Adding a project is still done through the old mechanism, but I will make that more clear. Probably by making an "Add your project" link at the top that just goes to the old new project page until the various new forms are done.
Sharing via pypi and listing from pypi is also very important. We don't want to be a completely different python projects island.
Contributions to the website, can be increased by one of my sprint goals to open up much of the code (baring a few secret bits like passwords and unfinished parts). Basically I'll try and
publish all website code on the pygame bitbucket but also on pypi and for the _javascript_ stuff on jquery plugins website and bower(like pip for front end _javascript_ stuff). There's already a couple of bits public. If you know how to do jquery plugins, then you can contribute new features quite easily. However, this site can be contributed to in many other ways not possible on other websites. There's over 500 items of content on there done by other people, with hundreds of contributors. Not only that, but there are a number of open website issues in which people can already contribute to the website. I hope the
API of public pygame.org data will also allow people to do their own projects with pygame website data more easily.
For
exploring projects in a creative interesting way, does anyone have any ideas? One idea was a big tag cloud that morphs around, somehow being used to view different parts of the pygame project galaxy. I'm going to put a column section up like
http://pygame.org/tags/ where you can browse through them, and also a page which has tags just like that page, followed by lists.
Project pages are another area where I really want to concentrate on, because that will provide a lot more value for people making things. Stuff like github, and bitbucket integration, and linking to their blogs and youtube feeds etc. I hope this can help with
collaboration more. But also when we can things from the projects like videos, blog posts, commits, etc and aggregate them for people -- that feeds interesting content into the main pygame website.
Finding libraries, should really go more in a direction of pypi. Part of this is getting pygame itself installable via pypi (almost there!). But we should also point out useful libraries and "spotlighted" projects better. There are already a list of some projects in the "awesome" section.
Thanks also to the people who have written bug reports in the issue tracker. Also, thank you to the people who have written words of encouragement - very welcome amongst a barrage of criticism (most of it constructive, useful, and thought out -- but at other times hostile, jerky or unreasoned).
It's still very much a work in progress, but one where progress is now happening every day. I want pygame to be a safe place where people who make things can create stuff with each others support, and that is what drives me.