feat: Updating the Amharic & Tigrinya Pages

[dyacob]

Overview

The Keyman.com website has 2 Ethiopic language pages for Amharic & Tigrinya (LMK if I’ve missed one) that are very similar and both in need of an update. I am happy to take this on (and am available now, the issue can be assigned to me) and would like to discuss an outline of proposed changes, and arrive at an agreement for a way forward, before undertaking the work. Please let me know in replies if the proposed changes are OK, or what to adjust or add.

First, a structural decision: Should the Amharic & Tigrinya pages continue, or should there be just a single “Ethiopic” page (the other pages could redirect to)? Or should there be all 3 pages?

I think the Amharic and Tigrinya pages should continue given their long-standing presence, but be simplified, pushing extra details to an “Ethiopic” page that they link to. The job of the Amharic and Tigrinya pages would be to present available keyboards in these respective languages in a way that is easy for the user to locate the keyboard that is right for them (e.g. by platform, layout type, etc) and move on. This is probably sufficient for more than 90% of the users.

An Ethiopic Page

An “Ethiopic” page would be more comprehensive than the language pages and present categories of keyboards (by language, etc), an FAQ that includes information on fonts. The purpose of an Ethiopic page would be to present all available keyboards in useful categories that help users find the most suitable keyboard for their needs, and provide other related information.

The major parts of an Ethiopic page are categorized keyboards and an FAQ.

Categories of Ethiopic Keyboards

Searching for “ethiopic” at keyman.com returns 25 results presently -and I know that there are more to come. It is a lot to sort through to understand the differences, thus some categories would help. I suggest the Ethiopic page would present categories and list keyboards under them.

It would also be nice to have a wizard interface, where there are dropdown menus for these various selection facets. For now a static page is assumed that applies some of these categories, each are also suitable as subcategories:

By Platform:

• Desktop Keyboards
  • Windows
  • Mac
  • Linux
• Mobile Keyboards
• Tablet Keyboards
• Web-based

Layout Type:

• QWERTY Layouts
• Typewriter Layouts (probably none)
• Other Layouts

By Input Style:

• 6th-order first
• 1st-order first

By Language:

• Language-Specific Keyboards
• General, or Multi-Language Keyboards

By Package Type:

• Keyboards that include fonts.
• Keyboards that do not include fonts.

Other?

FAQ Questions:

(This is information to provide on the page, it does not need to be referred to as an FAQ)

• Why are there different keyboards?
• Where do I get fonts, and how do I install them?
• Which keyboard works on iPhones/Android/Linux etc.?
• My keyboard doesn’t work/stopped working? Where do I get help?
• Where can I suggest an improvement?

Maintaining the pages

I think it should be a requirement that when an entirely new Ethiopic keyboard is submitted to Keyman (vs an update) that the Amharic or Tigrinya, and Ethiopic pages be updated.

[mcdurdin]

Thanks @dyacob. These are good ideas, and I am grateful that you are willing to take this on. For ease of maintenance, a set of static pages is actually less work to maintain than dynamic ones, at this scale. So would request static content. I agree that Amharic and Tigrinya should have their own pages, because they have order of magnitude more users than the other Ethiopic keyboards.

In terms of future maintenance, we'll endeavour to update the pages when new Ethiopic keyboards come online, but currently that's handled by @LornaSIL and @DavidLRowe, and that might be outside the scope of what they are up for doing currently.

All of the 'custom' keyboard landing pages on the site suffer from similar maintenance lag, and most of them are quite outdated. They are still useful, but we do need to make them more useful, long term.