Redesign of dlang.org
Aleksandar Ruzicic via Digitalmars-d
digitalmars-d at puremagic.com
Fri Apr 18 09:25:09 PDT 2014
On Friday, 18 April 2014 at 15:30:52 UTC, David Gileadi wrote:
>
> As the guy who was mostly responsible for the current look and
> feel of the website I can provide some insight into the effort
> required. The website is built using DDoc[1], and anyone who
> wants to change the look and feel will need to learn it. It's
> not difficult. It does mean that the site is static HTML, so
> any dynamism needs to be JS-only (and I think any efforts to
> make the pages largely JS-driven would meet resistance).
I know about DDoc usage, I already know it and using it, so that
wouldn't be the issue.
Regarding the dynamism, I would definitely go with some
JavaScript for
the search feature (I want to provide real-time
filtering/suggestions something like DevDocs[1]) but I would make
it optional (so that search is still usable with JS
disabled/unavailable).
> What was a little weird was trying to use DDoc to expand" the
> navigation tree when you're on a subpage of a main category.
> The original website listed every single page in the sidebar,
> which made the sidebar extremely unwieldy. Due to DDoc
> limitations I ended up having to put a CATEGORY_FOO macro in
> each page in the site, where the FOO is one of the categories
> in the sidebar. You may be able to figure out a better way.
> Just fork the site on github[2] and experiment!
Ahh I remember that lengthy sidebar, kudos for fixing it!
> Also note that there's a movement to make at least part of the
> website (the Phobos docs) use a different documentation
> generator, so the new look would need to be ported to that too.
> I suspect that wouldn't be hard.
I wasn't aware of that, do you by any chance have links to those
threads?
> Be aware that the current Tweets sidebar on the main page may
> be hard to get rid of; I noticed it wasn't in your mockup :)
Yeah, I've forgot about that (I'm using extensions to disable ads
and those "social" boxes so I forgot that thing exists).
> Based on the last go-around there would be some work required
> from Walter and Andrei, but assuming you're implementing the
> new look and feel then their work would be mostly related to
> pushing changes to a beta site and then to the main site. They
> can probably speak better to the amount of effort they'd need
> to put in. If you're not doing the work of implementing the new
> look and feel then I suspect this proposal is dead on arrival
> unless someone else steps up to help.
Yep, I'm planning of implementing new look and feel myself.
Of course any help would be very appreciated!
> Finally I like your look; I think it would be worth refining
> and pursuing. I make no claim to be a graphic designer and I'm
> certainly not offended by any criticism of the current look; at
> the time I had two goals; 1) look better than the previous site
> at digitalmars.com and 2) tame the massive sidebar into
> something more reasonable. I think they both succeeded but I'm
> very aware that things can look better.
Thanks! It is just a mockup I made in an hour or so, I would like
to have some real designer(s) involved in this to make it really
better.
The current design is waaay better than what we had before and I
thank you
on that! That change was really refreshing.
I just think that we should keep pushing forward. And I would
also like if
you could be able to join me in a new redesign (if it gets
approval), at least
in a consulting role. :)
[1] http://devdocs.io/
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