dlang.org redesign -- general thoughts and issues [part 1]

[Mengu via Digitalmars-d]

On Friday, 23 January 2015 at 10:31:45 UTC, aldanor wrote:
> Hi all, I've started redesigning dlang.org AGAIN (yea, I 
> know...). The front page is mostly done aside from a several 
> responsiveness and platform quirks, I will have the full 
> landing page + a random sample page from the docs this weekend. 
> On the technical side, rapid design + ddoc and working with 
> pure css don't work well together, so it's going to be a static 
> page or two and if/when everyone/anyone's happy with it, it can 
> be pulled apart into those fugly ddoc macros. An easy example 
> of why that's the case would be changing the color scheme or 
> general styling of multiple components -- in sass/less you can 
> just do a "@active-component: darken(@martian-red, 5%);" and 
> that will fix all the inherited ones across the stylesheet. 
> Same applies to reorganizing content in drastic ways. If using 
> node as a dependency to compile assets is acceptable, this 
> would sure the preferred way; otherwise, the compiled assets 
> could be frozen/minified and checked back in. More about 
> design-specific stuff later in another post.
>
> There are several issues with structure and presentation that I 
> think will have to be addressed. While compiling these, I also 
> had several people that know nothing about D look at the 
> website structrure and make independent comments. Please see my 
> semi-organized collection of thoughts below.
>
> Top-level link: APPENDICES
>
> ... what is that even supposed to mean? It looks more of an 
> official D style guide. TODO: rename to D STYLE GUIDE. TODO: 
> someone needs to go through it and update it to look more 
> official-style-guide-ish. And then again, it may be moved into 
> a learning/docs section and not be a top-level item.
>
> Top-level link: FAQ
>
> ... looks like a collection of stuff that doesn't belong 
> anywhere. The "FAQ" is almost as bad as naming it "MISC". Some 
> of the points actually look like they belong to an FAQ ("why 
> D?"), other ones belong to an official guide or examples; I 
> wouldn't ever guess that the info on anonymous structs/unions 
> would be in FAQ, that's just wrong. (there's also Books & 
> Articles --> How-tos etc; which makes it even harder).
>
> Top-level link: D1 HOME
>
> ... should be buried away somewhere deep as not to scare people 
> away. Those who need to find it already know where it is.
>
> Top-level-link: CHANGELOG
>
> ... is stale and rarely / randomly updated. This makes it look 
> like there is no development on the backend/phobos/runtime 
> going on whatsoever. There either needs to be an automated 
> aggregator for github pull requests (in which case there will 
> need to be a better policy on commit/pr descriptions so it's 
> automatable), or a responsibility of whoever's merging it to 
> spend 5 seconds of time to update the changelog (e.g. nasty ice 
> bug fixed, bugzilla issue #123, github pr #456).
>
> There should also be a friendly way to quickly see a list of 
> releases with dates and summaries and navigate to release notes 
> for each one without scrolling through 42km of text.
>
> Top-level link: SITEMAP
>
> ... should be removed, it's not 1999 anymore. Plus, a 
> well-structured website never needs a sitemap.
>
> Top-level-link: VISUAL D
>
> ... should move under Downloads & Tools; having this at 
> top-level has a Windows smell and may scare people away.
>
> Top-level links: STANDARD LIBRARY, D REFERENCE
>
> ... I suggest they are moved back into Documentation section 
> (as it is on the forum.dlang.org) which will contain these 
> (Language Reference / Standard Library) plus other subsections 
> e.g. D Style Guide.
>
> Book->Tutorial link (on forum.dlang.org) and other external 
> links:
>
> This is one of many random external links: 
> http://www.informit.com/articles/article.aspx?p=1381876. It's 
> just a really bad style for an official language website to 
> link to an article obscure external website (that is 5 years 
> old and probably outdated anyway). I suggest this is removed; 
> and, in case any of the information in that tutorial is not 
> duplicated in other guides, be manually moved/copied somewhere 
> else (or be made a part of the official guide/tutorial).
>
> REVIEW QUEUE:
>
> ... has this even changed at all in 6 months? If not, remove it 
> from top-level. This gives an impression of stagnation if 
> anyone were to follow that link and click "History" (I did).

i think it'd be great if you and sebastiaan koppe worked 
together. you guys can get together and combine your efforts so 
one of the work would not go in vain.