It would be very nice to have a link to the forum in the main page with more protagonism… Almast every time I enter JME website is to look the forum. I know you have bookmarks, but think about new people.
(sorry for my english…)
i don't exactly understand what you mean ( i suppose mean that the forum link on the main page should be given a better position or so), but to tell the truth i only seldom visit the main page. i usually jump directly to the forum 
sfera said:
i don't exactly understand what you mean ( i suppose mean that the forum link on the main page should be given a better position or so), but to tell the truth i only seldom visit the main page. i usually jump directly to the forum :)
yes exactly
Along the lines of reinvigorating the front page for jME with new news articles, perhaps a Mambo plugin could be added that would display the current activity of these forums (unless that already comes with mambo, I haven’t played with it for awhile) . For example an RSS feed of the latest posts, it’d probably be useful to do a recent wiki feed as well, and perhaps latest development checkins (ok maybe going to far, but RSS feeds are fun).
Here’s a list of some RSS plugins for mambo. http://mamboxchange.com/search/?type_of_search=soft&words=RSS&Search=Search
I posted a wiki article(jME Community Tips) describing some tips on how to navigate through the jME community. Some of the tips I think useful for newcomers (feel free to add any tips you have, and collaborate on the wiki article):
- Viewing unread posts since last visit http://www.jmonkeyengine.com/jmeforum/index.php?action=unread
- Viewing the top ten latest posts: http://www.jmonkeyengine.com/jmeforum/index.php?action=recent
- Importing an RSS feed of the jME forums into an RSS reader like [url=http://Google Reader]Google Reader[/url] the feed URL is http://jmonkeyengine.com/jmeforum/index.php?type=rss;action=.xml
- An RSS feed for latest jME wiki posts http://www.jmonkeyengine.com/wiki/feed.php?DokuWiki=3ce3e7e7881dfaab7ab41e5b427c4bc9
Perhaps this information could be expanded to fit into the general jME getting started stuff. We can use the wiki article kind of like a FAQ/best practices guide for interacting with the jME community.
I think we should just use DHTML to have the link to the forum float around on screen and follow your mouse so you can always find it. 
Haha agreed, and probably just add a scrolling marquee of the latest topics that blink on and off, across the top and bottom of the page. XD
Lots of good ideas here. Doug, any particular plugin to look at first?
Also, thanks to those who have already made the front page look a lot nicer!
renanse, I think Mambo/Joomla comes with a component that lets you embed RSS feeds onto your site, it's the news feed component. I haven't messed around with it to much. I was only able to get it to display the feeds on a separate joomla page.
Maybe there is a way to embed a small widget on the front page with the news, displaying the latest forum topics, and perhaps latest updated wiki topics, that'd be a nice thing to have.
I think that would be a good way of getting the activity of the jME community onto the front page, so that new comers can immediately see what's going on.
Like I said in the Dzone post, when I get a chance I'm going to setup a couple test content management systems (through fantastico on my web host) and see which ones I can get working with my ideas then I can give you guys some concrete implemented suggestions on what might make the front page site work better.
I looked into adding RSS feeds to mambo, and it appears you can create "news feeds" that will spit out the contents of an RSS feed onto your mambo site, the only problem is it seems like you can only use it if you click the news feeds button, then select the category then the feed, I don't know how you can make that specific news feed a content item by itself on the main page...
Basically in mambo admin go to Components>>News Feeds>>Manage News Feeds >> (Then create a new one with the button in the upper right)...
I'll look into it more and if I can send you the steps to do it if I figure it out. (Mambo is such a counterintuitive beast to try to just use without looking up the documentation).
Check out my example here:
http://eventhorizongames.com/mambo/index.php?option=com_newsfeeds&catid=13&Itemid=7
I think another really cool feature to add to the site would be to display jME news in a similar fashion to the stories on www.digg.com, www.dzone.com, and www.programming.reddit.com stories, where the users can vote up or down interesting articles. I haven't really looked into what open source software exists to support that, but I'm willing to bet something is available. Also being able to link news stories with a forum topic on the jME forums I think will become more and more useful when people start using and viewing the main site, because then they'll be able to jump right into the discussion from the main page.
Do you want to put the IRC link in the header somewhere ??