Support/Kitsune/new-iA-integration/answers

We have identified 3 types of pages of 4 levels of depth within the architecture:

• Home Page - Where user selects Product or Task navigation
• Topic Page - Where user selects the Topic if they have started from the Product navigation
• Landing Page - The list of articles. Group in sub-topics.

We have defined 3 different possibilities:

Completely manual

The way we have implemented it today. The work is done for English but it will require a lot of manual work for localizers and it’s hard to maintain.

Whenever a new article is maintained we need to find where it is in the navigation and update it. This represents risks around broken links and articles not being linked from anywhere.

Completely automated

The way I proposed to do it (https://wiki.mozilla.org/Support/KB/Meetings/2012-04-26) back last month. Have 2 wiki pages that contains the navigation tree for Product initiated and Topic initiated.

Example:

Firefox

• Getting Started
  • How to download Firefox?<topic>Download</topic>
  • Blablabla <topic>Blabla</topic>
• Privacy
  • How to manage Firewall issues <topic>Firewall</topic>

Firefox Mobile

• Getting Started
  • How to download Firefox?<topic>Download</topic>
  • Blablabla <topic>Blabla</topic>
• Privacy
  • How to manage Firewall issues <topic>Firewall</topic>

.. ..

Cons:

• Development implications unclear.

Benefits:

• Technically gives hierarchy to the flat wiki that we have today.
• Centralized maintenance
• Articles are auto-populated so as long as they have “topics” they will be properly indexed.

Automated Landing Pages

The compromise is to create the home page and topic pages manually. This implies creating around 50-60 pages manually (they are already created for English) but instead of maintaining the articles manually, we will use more granular topics and we will develop an specific mark-up that retrieves all the articles specific to that “sub-topic”. In the example above this will be Firewall or Download.

Landing pages will be then something like:

Title of the subcategory Request for the articles Title of the subcategory Request for the articles … ..

Benefits:

• This is easier to maintain than the manual version.
• It avoids issues of articles not being linked or broken links.

Cons:

• Still requires a lot of effort for localization (specially at the beginning).

In order to make a decision it’s going to be important to understand the development cost of each solution.

Some additional ideas:

• In the fully automated version, images can be referred in the same line so categories that have an image will have an extra value in the same line. If no image is added, that space is left blank.
• In the non fully automated versions the Product and Topic picker will need to be defined at the database and links to the images (whenever they are images) will live there.
• Product Picker and Breadcrumb can have awareness of the path based on the URL. The URL will reflect the path the user is taking. In the case of coming from an external referral we will assume that it was a navigation initiated through Product. (i.e. support.mozilla.org/firefox/privacy/cookies/how+do+i+clear+cookies)