Perl.com: A New Edition of www.perl.com

Published on Perl.com http://www.perl.com/pub/a/1999/07/newperl.html
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A New Edition of www.perl.com
By Dale Dougherty
July 15, 1999

I'd like to welcome you to this new edition of www.perl.com and tell you about some of the changes we made to the site.

Easier Navigation

We simplified the navigation menu so that it's easy to find the site's major sections and functions. This menu consists of the following choices: Download, Documentation, CPAN, FAQS, Marketplace, Features and Search.

New Features for Home Page

The home page contains a number of new things:

several feature articles;
a list of short news items;
a Perl Cookbook recipe of the day;
an area that features a Larry Wall quote which changes when you re-load;
a list of Larry's talks;
a list of new items from Tom Christiansen called Perlland.
a list of commonly asked questions, mainly about the site or about the Perl market, questions that are not typically answered in the FAQ.

You'll also find the Perl Reference on the www.perl.com home page It's organized as a hierarchy for the topics. An alphabetical list of topics is also available as a drop-down box on the main menu.

Better Access to Perl Documentation and FAQs

This new site organizes Perl documentation, improving format and consistency of the HTML versions of Perl man pages as well as the FAQs. We hope this makes the core documentation more accessible for those who want to use it in a Web browser. We've also catalogued the individual documentation files so that you will be able to search for them more easily.

Combined Search

The site's search engine now looks across the site to return documentation, feature articles as well as items found in the Perl Reference. The engine is not very efficient right now but we'll work on it. We intend to provide a better search engine soon.

Improved Download Instructions

A lot of new users stumble through the process of downloading Perl. We've re-written the download instructions in hopes that new users will find it easier select the right source or binary to download.

New Perl Marketplace

This version of www.perl.com now has the Perl Marketplace, in which you'll find new products and services for the Perl community. Our coverage isn't complete yet, so let us know if there are products which should be listed.

Please let me know what you like and don't like about the new version.

Thanks,
Dale

Dale Dougherty (dale@songline.com)
Publisher, www.perl.com