Use proper frameworks for building dlang.org

Andrei Alexandrescu via Digitalmars-d digitalmars-d at puremagic.com
Sun Jan 18 09:03:10 PST 2015


On 1/18/15 6:00 AM, aldanor wrote:
> On Sunday, 18 January 2015 at 13:01:48 UTC, MattCoder wrote:
>> On Sunday, 18 January 2015 at 10:24:29 UTC, Jacob Carlborg wrote:
>>> What do you think?
>>
>> I'm seeing a lot a topics regards about fixing website, styles an so
>> on. Maybe is time to try to raise money and hire someone with good
>> knowledge and of course freetime to work only on it?
>>
>> Matheus.
>
> It also looks a bit wrong seeing Andrei as one of the core devs putting
> so much time into the website issues, styling in particular (don't get
> me wrong, this is absolutely fantastic that someone's willing to do
> that, thanks Andrei -- and it looks like most of the community now
> recognizes the need).

To be frank, that's more than a bit wrong.

Let me put this in perspective. We're facing a momentous year with 
ambitious goals, stiff competition, and a growing community to support.

At the beginning of January I wanted to create a "vision" document, 
publish it here, and talk about it this Thursday at 
http://www.meetup.com/D-Lang-Sillicon-Valley/events/219413448/ (be 
there!). That kind of work requires a certain state of mind and some 
good getting into it, and it's already past mid January with nothing to 
show.

Also, I am looking at creating a D Language Foundation. A lawyer is 
waiting for information from me since January 5.

Not to mention a bunch of work on Phobos (relational algebra, container 
stuff, reviewing work that's waiting to be reviewed, documentation 
again). I also wanted to write "The Range Bible" that formalizes 
everything there is about ranges.

Hefty goals.

All of that didn't happen because I got into fixing things on the 
website. It started with fixes for a few blatant issues and breakages, 
and it only got more involved. As I'm sure it's known to all of us that 
kind of stuff gets you into a flow that's damaging to break. I figured 
if I let myself interrupted it'll take months before I get back to it 
and nobody else will, so I pushed through a number of things until the 
menus of yesterday. My plan is to "outsource" as much of the site as 
possible to CSS, then ask a designer to improve the CSS. People can do 
pretty amazing things with those. After the recent work I did we have 
almost no "raw" HTML tags in the site docs - all are either styled with 
classes or semantically meaningful.

Anyhow, quite literally I don't have the time for vision because I'm too 
busy fixing the website.

The perhaps less productive factor is the constant bickering on the 
newsgroup. For every line of code it seems there's 30 people to comment 
on it, but too few actually write a better one. Shoveling crap once in a 
while is vigorous exercise, but doing it surrounded by sage people 
sitting on their testes and telling how it should be done is... quite 
fun :o).

> It's that any semi-decent web designer would probably do a better job on
> the website design and layout while still spending less time doing that
> (because they've done it a hundred times already and/or do it for
> living). However, not every web designer can hack on system language
> internals and review D PRs!.. So someone needs to step up and do it
> (and/or redo it, and/or hire someone to do it).
>
> That's just my 2 cents which is purely subjective.

That's my plan exactly (I'll talk more on this). Problem is, until 
recently the site was not in shape to be restyled because it used a 
bunch of ad-hoc inconsistent styling. Right now a lot more is factored 
into the CSS, and it should be a modular job to ask a professional 
designer to redo the CSS.


Andrei



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