Please help me with improving dlang.org

Andrei Alexandrescu via Digitalmars-d digitalmars-d at puremagic.com
Sun Jan 18 18:00:53 PST 2015


On 1/18/15 4:57 PM, Mike wrote:
> On Sunday, 18 January 2015 at 02:18:16 UTC, Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
>> I took the better part of today working on this:
>> https://github.com/D-Programming-Language/dlang.org/pull/780. See demo
>> at http://erdani.com/d/.
>>
>> What do you all think? Is it an improvement over what we have now?
>>
>> I'd appreciate your help with reviewing and pulling this, and also
>> with improving the colors (which I'm terrible at) and page tracking as
>> mentioned in the pull request.
>>
>
> What are your primary concerns with the website?  I think it would help
> to know what you are trying to achieve.

Good point.

1. The site design/styling is old. Simply changing it is now necessary 
just as a refresher.

2. Of course, we'd also like things to be better. The chaotic navigation 
menu on the left was something I long wished to replace with a more 
modern on.

3. Part of my effort is to replace all manual html ad-hoc styles with 
styles in the css. That is invisible right now but will become very 
useful when we pass the site for improvement to a specialist.

> Personally, although dlang.org isn't particularly pretty, I think its
> fine.  It's the unmaintained and unfinished content that's the real
> problem, not the aesthetics.  I've made a number of PRs to move
> "unofficial" content to the wiki so it could be better maintained there,
> and if not maintained, at least appear less official.

Thanks!

> I believe
> dlang.org's lack of maintenance is partially due to the issues mentioned
> below. I've tried to do some improvements on dlang.org, and its a PITA. If it
> were made more convenient, there would be greater participation from me,
> and likely others.  So, I offer the following suggestion:
>
> 1) Modify the build scripts and the instructions on dlang.org so that
> it's abundantly clear how to fork, modify, build, verify, submit PRs
> without having read verbose instructions and without having to clone and
> build dmd, druntime, phobos, and other repositories just to get an html
> page to verify an edit.  I would do this myself, but an important
> prerequisite to updating build scripts and documentation is knowledge,
> which I have yet to possess.  But someone in this community knows.

We definitely need to get that working. There are a couple of blocking 
issues (like the interference of local configuration files on the site 
build) but I trust we'll get over them soon.

> 2) Aside from the documentation generated from the source code, why does
> the website need to be "built"?  IMO a static website like dlang.org
> shouldn't need any additional tools other than a browser and an image
> editor.  I may explore some options later, but only after 1) is done.

The short answer is because there's no robust inclusion and code reuse 
solution at HTML level.


Andrei



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