Jazz2Online has evolved a fair bit in the past year (give or take a few months), and I think we can be happy with the current state of the site; there's still a steady influx of downloads, and there's a number of loyal members that, coupled with the odd new member, manages to keep the site active. Of course activity isn't what it used to be during the heydays of the site, but that's what to be expected given the age of J2O's main subject.

However I've noticed during the past few months that when adding new features it's hard to give them a fitting place in the site's layout. There's also a number of site sections (such as articles and links, and the static "info" pages) that, in my feeling, aren't adequately presented.

Both the articles and links section are more or less dead, and no additions of worth have been made for a long time, but yet they're prominently featured in the site's navigation. On the other hand, other sections such as the user's photo gallery or the wiki only have a place in the "other" submenu, while I think they're at this moment more important than aforementioned dead sections given their activity or content.

There's also a few other parts that could do with restructuring. Spread over several places (on and off J2O) there's a lot of information about JJ2's inner workings, which could be gathered and featured in a central place. A similar issue is that the wiki and nodes system are basically comparable, and yet they're using two separate systems and not easily browsable. While there's some nodes with very useful information (such as some about why online play won't work, or the Jazz Jackrabbit FAQ) they're often not easy to find and there's no central list of nodes, save for the (non-dynamic) sitemap which itself is buried in a few layers of links.

What I'm getting at is that I think now is a good time for tweaking Jazz2Online's layout and overall structure. There's no immediate features that need adding or large bugs to be fixed (if there are, please do tell!) and the back-end is fairly stable. This is something that has been discussed before in several places (amongst which are some threads in this subforum), but no one has gotten around to working on it yet. As I should have some time available the next few months, and am right now very familiar with J2O's codebase (having written a large part of it), I should be able to work on it.

I started prototyping something here, but decided that it might be a better idea to start a thread about it first. While I've acted mostly on my own accord with regards to working on J2O recently, hopefully meanwhile paying adequate attention to bug reports and feature requests, I think this warrants some more discussion.

A few of my ideas about an improved navigation structure can be seen in that prototype; more prominent "online play" and "knowledge" (couldn't think of a better term at the time) sections and "sub-links" in submenu-like lists on the top instead of the side, that are viewable even when not currently visiting that section. Furthermore I thought about using the breadcrumbs (currently seen in your PM inbox) site-wide, to make it more obvious to users where they are in relation to the site's structure.

What's currently the sidebar would (in this prototype) feature recent site additions, such as the newest levels, newsposts, user actions, forum posts, clanwar results or whatever. Whether this is worth being featured on each page is debatable and I'm not really sure whether it's a good idea. One thing I am fairly sure about is that the current sidebars need to be rethought; they take up a lot of space while only showing a relatively limited amount of links. They could be replaced by the aforementioned submenus at the top, and perhaps a few page-specific links.

I also propose merging the articles, nodes and links systems with the wiki. Namespaces (or categories) could be used to limit access to certain types of wiki articles. This has been discussed often before and I think it's something that's agreed on by most people. It would be a waste to simply remove the articles and links sections, and by moving their content to the wiki it would be preserved without having to keep the respective storage and editing systems in place.

All this is a lot of work and especially moving content around will require a lot of manual editing. I'm up for the task of working on it, and probably will (though I can make no commitments about when it'd be finished), but I'd appreciate others thoughts and help with it. If you have any feedback to what I've posted here or reservations with regards to me working on it, please share it.