Redesign of dlang.org

[welkam via Digitalmars-d]

On Thursday, 24 December 2015 at 06:43:32 UTC, Andrei 
Alexandrescu wrote:
> 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".

Because using text editor that can auto complete html is too much 
to ask?
 From what I saw most Ddoc is used to make simple html tags like 
$(P text) is translated to <p>text</p> so running few regex 
replace should fix that. Unless there are some macros that are 
more advanced.

> 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

What skills web developers have: html/css, javascript, PHP, 
MySQL, Apache.

What skills are needed for dlang.org: CSS, javascript, make 
files, ddoc, D, dub, Vibe.d and its own way of generating html.

Not to mention that dlang has unique way of generating static 
html pages

You are not making it more accessible by adding one more 
technology that is not usually used for web development.

Here is how various languages are embedded in html
PHP: <?php code ?> or <? code ?>
Ruby on rails: <% code %>
Django(python): {% code %}
Hack: <?hh {code}
D: can`t.

Why cant D be used like all other web languages? (rhetorical 
question)

It would be nice if there were possibility of writing html with 
<?d code ?> in html and with structure like this:

<?d= include("header.dd");?>
<div>
<?d= content ?>
</div>
<?d=include("footer.dd");?>

and rdmd.dd could be found in folder views/Compilers&Tools/

this way any PHP, Ruby, Python, Hack developer could just look at 
dlang.org project and feel at home.

Todays system might not be terrible, but lack of documentation 
was a deal breaker for me. I wanted to fiddle with website layout 
and here how it went.

Welkam followed instructions and successfully generated html 
files. Why welkam needed to compile new dmd is not clear. Then 
welkam opened dlang.org folder. He saw 155 items and sighed. 
Anyway he wanted to edit documentation so the mess didnt bothered 
too much so he opened 
/home/welkam/D/dlang.org/dpl-docs/source/app.d. "I need to look 
at posix.mak to better understand how this page is built" - he 
said, but after looking at mak file he got more confused, because 
he doesnt understand make language. Welkam gave up and decided 
that editing html of one page would be easier for him and if he 
created something useful he would ask some help implementing it.