MDN/Archives/Development/Redesign/Testing

MDN is undergoing a major redesign with improved visual style, layout, page customization options, navigation, and platform features. To ensure that the redesign is the best it can be, we have made it available to anyone who would like to help with beta testing. Remember that this is a beta, so while we are correcting issues quickly, you may discover some bumps along the way.

How to become an MDN beta tester

• Login into MDN.
• Edit your profile.
• Check the beta user checkbox.

Change overview

The most obvious differences include the new visual style and the new layout. Updates have also been made to the homepage, to site navigation, and to major features like site search. Additionally, some topics like Firefox OS and Web Apps are now represented as Zones, documentation sections with improved landing pages and a new secondary navigation sidebar.

Testing

We would love for you to go around the site and take a look at everything. Try reading documentation, editing pages and making other site contributions. Remember that even though you will see our new design, you will be working with the same documentation everyone else sees. Any changes you make will be seen by all users, whether they are testing the beta or not. So as part of your testing, please don't randomly change or delete content!

Suggestions

Looking for some ideas of things to do? Try testing out the following:

• Documentation: Read our documentation just as you normally would. Pay attention to code samples, images, and videos. Some documentation, especially lesser-known documentation, has not yet been updated to fit with this new design. Let us know if you come across anything that doesn't look right.
• Homepage: Is the content of the homepage valuable to you? How about the positioning, size and style of this content?
• Navigation: Try getting around using only major site navigation. Can you find the information you need?
• Search: Try out the improved search system. Consider both the experience of searching and the quality of search results.
• Performance: How is performance? Is it better or worse than it was with the old design?
• Editing: How is the experience of editing? (Remember, your edits will be seen by everyone, whether they are testing the beta or not.)
• Template editing: Assuming you have account privileges, how is the experience of editing templates? (Again, remember that your edits affect all users.)
• Responsive Design: The new design supports many different screen resolutions. How is the experience of using MDN on a tablet, phone, or other device?

Sharing feedback / Reporting Bugs

Let us know what you think! Bug reports, change requests and general feedback are all welcome. The more feedback you share, the better the design will be.

Before anything else, please file one bug for each piece of feedback you want to share. We would love to hear from you on IRC and through our mailing lists, but if you have not already filed a bug we will politely ask you to do so. Remember to always use this form, as it will group feedback appropriately and ensure that the team sees it.

Follow up on Bugs / Feedback

A couple times each week, we'll send out the list of bugs that are new and need to be categorized (blocks launch or does not) to the mdn-drivers@mozilla.org mailing list (which is used to prioritize work on MDN and is open for anyone to participate). Bugs will be discussed there and the team can, collectively, decide what needs to be fixed before the redesign launches to the general public. We also will have a weekly, open meeting to make calls on anything that is stalled. Meetings are held every Tuesday at 17:00 UTC (10am PST) on IRC in #devmo.

• Launch blocking bugs
• New/to be processed bugs
• Bugs that can be addressed after launch

Following development in real time

If you want to stay in the loop on a bug or a set of bugs, be sure to add yourself to the "cc" list. Designers and developers update bugs with discussions and decisions as they go. A github robot will automatically comment on bugs when corresponding code is merged into the master line of development. Those commits are automatically pushed to the dev server every 5 minutes:

https://developer-dev.allizom.org/

The dev team pushes commits to stage and production servers when the code is ready. You can see which commits are on the stage & production servers here:

http://mzl.la/mdn_whats_deployed

Commits also often include numbers of bugs that you can visit to see relevant discussions.

Weekly Meeting Notes

• 05 November, 2013
• 29 October, 2013
• 15 October, 2013

General Questions

You can join the conversation in IRC.

• #mdn for general discussion
• #devmo for docs & content
• #mdndev for platform coding

You can also join our mailing lists.

• dev-mdc@mozilla.org for docs & content
• dev-mdn@mozilla.org for platform coding

Thanks!

We are very excited to be launching the beta of this new design, and are even more excited to be working with you to make it better. Thank you for all of your feedback.