Redesign of dlang.org

[Andrei Alexandrescu via Digitalmars-d]

On 12/24/2015 01:14 AM, Thomas Mader wrote:
> That is very reasonable I too think but isn't it a question of viewpoint?
> I see the dependency chain for a Website as follows:
>
> 1) HTML
> 2) HTML, CSS
> 3) HTML, CSS, Javascript
>
> It seems that the dlang.org Homepage needs CSS and Javascript so 3 is
> the minimal dependency chain.
> Ddoc is an additional dependency already and might be more efficient to
> insiders but to outsiders it is an obstacle.
> I think you are right in saying that the site should be build with
> technologies you are most efficient with but you should also consider
> the obstacle you are building up by this.
> It's hard to estimate the outcome of dropping ddoc but you might get
> more helpers by this move.
>
> So I guess it's a question of how many contributers you get by removing
> ddoc which nobody is able to tell beforehand.
> For this reason why not just try to go without it for now and decide
> later on if it is worth it or not.
> I can't imagine that you loose that much efficiency by dropping ddoc for
> some time and I don't think it would be that much work to switch to ddoc
> later on.
> But on the other hand I don't have a clue and might be totally wrong. :-)
>
> By this decision you would also get a contributor who is willing to
> build the initial site which is propably the hardest thing to do.

Currently dlang.org has over 62KLOC of Ddoc source, so any significant 
surgery on it will be a large effort. Dropping ddoc means we'd need to 
use another templating engine (getting back to raw html would be too 
much trouble), and 10 people have 11 ideas about which template engine 
is used by "everyone".

I can give you right now an estimate - dropping ddoc and replacing it 
with vibe.d is unlikely to be a landslide success. When the alternate 
documentation was introduced using vibe.d, my hope was that everybody 
would be all over it like a cheap white suit on rice, and that the use 
of vibe.d would organically grow to make the stdlib documentation 
stellar, and then engulf the main site. Sadly participation was scant, 
and we had a couple of vibe.d-related situations in which the maintainer 
division (ahem... Vladimir and myself) had no idea on what to do and had 
nobody to rely on.

Let me put that another way: for folks who want to improve dlang.org but 
for whom ddoc is an impediment, the option exists TODAY to work on large 
parts of the site that have nothing to do with it. Yet from what I can 
tell nobody is taking it. Would you have an interest? (Serious question.)


Thanks,

Andrei