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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