Use proper frameworks for building dlang.org

[Andrei Alexandrescu via Digitalmars-d]

On 1/18/15 2:24 AM, Jacob Carlborg wrote:
> Lately Andrei has worked a lot with improving the dlang.org site in
> various ways. To me it getting more clear and clear that Ddoc is not the
> right tool for building a web site. Especially the latest "improvement"
> [1] shows that it's not a good idea to reinvent the wheel, especially
> when it's not an improvement, at all.

Heheh, way to use Archuduke's Ferdinand assassination :o). I'm sorry 
Jacob but this one is really out there.

DDoc has nothing with this, and to the extent it does it actually helps.

So I start yesterday with searching "Css vertical menus" and the such. 
After some browsing I figured a sort of hierarchical/accordion menu 
would be good for us. There's plenty of them to choose from, neither of 
which require Rails - apparently there are many lost souls out there. I 
insisted on one that doesn't need Javascript, but at that point I 
couldn't find any. So I settled for those that use jQuery, which we 
already use so - nice. There are plenty of those too.

So I chose one, downloaded, and integrated it within our site. The funny 
part is it was easier to work with the thing _because_ of ddoc, not in 
spite of it. So our source code for menus looks like this: 
http://goo.gl/QddFkh. It makes it very easy to move entries around, 
change them all at once, etc. That generates http://goo.gl/ZLJisi, which 
even after nice formatting is quite difficult to work with.

I might be ignorant but I have difficulty figuring exactly where ddoc's 
fault is. I literally had a big chuckle when I saw you attempting to use 
my poor taste in colors as a reason to ditch ddoc.

> Why don't we instead make use of a proper framework both on the server
> side and client side. Personally I would go with Ruby on Rails but I
> know that most of you here would hate that so a better suggestion would
> probably be vibe.d. For the client side I'm thinking Bootstrap and jQuery.

Wait, jQuery is the pitts! No?

> The biggest reason why I would prefer Rails is because I know everything
> that is needed is already implemented and easily available. I can not
> say the same thing about vibe.d. But it might be enough for dlang.org, I
> don't know.
>
> What do you think?
>
> [1] http://forum.dlang.org/thread/m9f558$lbb$1@digitalmars.com

If we change the tooling, I'd say vibe.d is the best option for obvious 
dogfooding reasons. The problem with Rails and other frameworks is that 
*you* prefer it, but *I* and *others* are in for most of the work with it.


Andrei