ports.php: category pages hard to navigate; consider by-letter navigation

[ryandesign (Ryan Carsten Schmidt)]

If you're on a category page, the only available navigation links let you go to pages by number. This is not useful if you want to, say, browse a category for all ports whose names start with a particular letter.

This deficiency was pointed out to me via email by Mojca Miklavec.

[(none)]

Milestone Website & Documentation deleted

[cooljeanius (Eric Gallager)]

This deficiency was pointed out to me via email by Mojca Miklavec.

So mojca@… should probably be cc-ed on this issue, right?

[cooljeanius (Eric Gallager)]

Cc Me!

[ryandesign (Ryan Carsten Schmidt)]

I have considered this problem recently, and I'm not convinced by-letter navigation is doable. It might work acceptably for categories where the first letter of the port names have a somewhat uniform distribution. But categories like python, perl and php will have quite a large collision as most of the ports in those categories begin with the same letters.

Ultimately, I think lists of ports in categories are not very useful for users, and we should focus instead on having a good search function that will let users find what they're looking for. Lists of ports in categories are still a good way for search engines to index our ports tree, but they don't care that they're navigating by page number.

[mf2k (Frank Schima)]

jmpp is no longer active. See #44809.

[raimue (Rainer Müller)]

ports.php is gone and has been replaced with the new web application at ports.macports.org.