Originally the SoSLUG site relied on views and a free tagging taxonomy to navigate the site. Consequently few items of content appeared in any menu structure, rather content was related by a taxonomy term, and listed by the date it was posted?. For news items, forums, and events, this approach has an obvious advantage, since this content is ordered by time.
From the outset, web design took a different approach, favouring a menu system to structure the content. In common with the HowTo's etc. on the SoSLUG site, its content is primarily instructional. In this instance, content is ordered by subject, having little or no time dependence. Top level menu items provide a broad introduction, which can then be broken down into progressively more detail at each sub level in the menu.
A problem with any menu structure arises when content can be placed in different menu locations. To overcome this, taxonomy terms are used to cross reference different sections.
A menu structure has now been added to SoSLUG, and the taxonomy tidied up. but the dilemma hasn't go away, the site needs both menu and views, if news, and events are not to be buried in a menu somewhere. How do we resolve this?
A view can be a page or a block. The latter can be embedded in a page (node), which overcomes the maintenance issue of page views not counting as nodes.
Buried content
I'm not sure menu's are the right way to go. I wrote a quick piece about 20 years of Linux. Placed it in the menu structure under events (as it was the only place I could think of!) and that was that. But, whereas before, new articles would automatically appear on the "home" page and eventually scroll off the bottom, it now no longer appears. In other words, it's buried in the menu structure, and no one knows it's even been written.
The problem I can see with using menu's is, really useful stuff will be written and no one will ever be aware, other than via a search engine.
Which brings me to another aspect. For search engine optimisation purposes, the home page is likely to secure a higher ranking if it's constantly changing. Something that was a natural progression with how it was set up previously.
Buried treasure
I would not advocate, menu's over views, or vica versa, both have an important role to play. Stuff getting lost applies equally to the views. Over a period of time, articles also slipped out of sight. Perhaps the only hook, in either case menu/view are taxonomy terms, but here to, selecting material by turn also turned up the same articles time and again, whether they were relevant or not. This may be in part down to the use of "free tagging".
All content (nodes) should now be attached to a menu, and yes the current structure is far from perfect. The taxonomy vocabularies have also been overhauled, to introduce a combination of multi select and free tagging. Again still not perfect.
The upshot of these changes, and as recent events have shown, is we are getting better at deciding which works best for different categories of data, and as a consequence of the changes to date, are in better shape to deal with the issues. Tutorials, howto's etc. probably favour a menu driven approach, whereas news, events, forums etc. may favour views. We now need to revisit views, especially now our experience with this module has also improved, to better specify what they are needed to do.
You are certainly right, we should not loose sight of SEO (search engine optimisation). I'm no expert on SEO, but I guess all newcontent is a factor in determining these rankings, not least the front page., and the blocks we place there.
Latest revisions view on front page
I just visited the site and saw your new entries. As a result the Software freedom day event has been demoted, meaning we have now lost control of where such items might be placed by an administrator. For example if we wanted to promote an event on the first page and at the top of the list, the publishing options should allow us that control. I find with the current view, I have no control over where items are placed. I think that in view of the importance of the event this week, an administrator should be able to prioritise the list in some way,
Latest revisions - front page
Ok I've tweaked the sort criteria in the (Homepage) view to put stickies back at the top; which solves the immediate problem and achieves what you want. Almost certainly we need to revisit this. If you remember we set this to just show stickies, while we were reorganising the menus. Consequently it meant that when members published new content it didn't appear, so is was opened up again, hence the problem, and why we need to 'spec' this properly. I.e. we probably need two views, one for news, events etc. and another for latest revisions.
Removing the content type wiki, also broke a number of views which used this as a filter. I have fixed the view itself, but haven't yet managed to attach it to the various sections; because they rely on an argument to filter the content. I am exploring a number of options, including the CCK module.