bug#26006: [Website] Integral update proposal

[Ludovic Courtès]

Hello sirgazil!

It’s always a pleasure to read you.  :-)  Basically, I like all of your
proposals.  Some comments below.

sirgazil <address@hidden> skribis:

> Navigation bar
> ==============
>
> Bar mockup: 
> https://multimedialib.files.wordpress.com/2017/03/guixsd-menu-2017-03-06.png
>
> The current navigation bar is growing, so I think it may be good to define a 
> style so that people can build more complex menus if necessary (but I hope it 
> won't get too complex).
>
> I propose the graphic change you see in the mockup—thin black line at the 
> bottom, navigation items are white while idle, and yellow with a black 
> indicator at the bottom when active— as well as the actual items and their 
> ordering.

Very good idea, definitely an improvement.

> Home page
> =========
>
> Home mockup: 
> https://multimedialib.files.wordpress.com/2017/03/guixsd-home-view-2017-03-06.png
>
> I propose the changes in the mockup above because of the following reasons:
>
> 1. Some people still confuse Guix with GuixSD.
> 2. Some people still ask if Guix can be used on top of other distributions.
> 3. Some people think pitching GuixSD and Guix to specific crowds is good (of 
> course it is). [1]
>
> To address the first two points, I changed the order of the content so that 
> information refers to GuixSD first, Guix as a part of it, and then added a 
> section that mentions specifically the use of Guix in other distros.
>
> For point three, I added a section that links to blog posts that explain 
> GuixSD and Guix in the context of a particular field (this part requires the 
> current News pages to become a Blog instead. See below).
>
> Finally, Ricardo Wurmus commented that there were too many styles of buttons, 
> and I agree with him, so I made them homogeneous.

Agreed.

> News pages
> ==========
>
> News list mockup: 
> https://multimedialib.files.wordpress.com/2017/03/guixsd-blog-list-2017-03-06.png
> News details mockup: 
> https://multimedialib.files.wordpress.com/2017/03/guixsd-blog-post-2017-03-06.png
>
> I suggest to convert News into a blog instead. This could make it easier to 
> add information targeted at different audiences without making the website 
> more complex. Additionally, we could move to the blog content like talks, 
> papers, and posts currently listed in the Help page.

Sounds great.

> I remember that Ludovic commented in #guix that he would like a better way to 
> display talks in the website... [2] With the design in the mockup above, you 
> just click on the "Talks" tag, and you have a nice preview and summary of all 
> talks.

Yes!  There’s also the question of how much work it’ll be to maintain
the talks part (like whether we need to manually make “posters” for each
video and so on.)  The less work, the better.

At the same time, we should reach out to people who’d like to contribute
to Guix in a less-technical way.  There’s a lot that could be done to
keep the web site lively, and it would be great to let more people take
care of that.

> Also, Haunt, the current static site generator used to build the website, can 
> create an atom feed for every tag in the blog, so people can subscribe to 
> whatever topic is more interesting to them. Personally, I'd like to subscribe 
> to a "Security" feed to keep informed about important security updates (see 
> bug #25852). [3]

I agree, we should use tags.  A first step will be to add tags to the
existing posts.

> Packages pages
> ==============
>
> Package list mockup: 
> https://multimedialib.files.wordpress.com/2017/03/guixsd-package-list-2017-03-06.png
> Package details mockup: 
> https://multimedialib.files.wordpress.com/2017/03/guixsd-package-detail-2017-03-06.png
>
> I actually proposed this update in bug #25227,[4] but decided to review the 
> whole website design, so I put it here for reference.

There’s still the issue that we don’t have screenshots, but other than
that it looks great.

> Help page
> =========
>
> * Move talks, papers, and posts to the Blog.
> * Allow little boxes to be distributed along the whole width of the screen.

Good.

> Contribute page
> ===============
>
> * Allow little boxes to be distributed along the whole width of the screen.
>
>
> Infrastructure
> ==============
>
> Personally, I'd like to be able to access the website at "guixsd.org", and 
> use a git repository for deployment of the static website.
>
> However, we are currently using the resources provided by Savannah for 
> hosting, which means we have to use a CVS repository to deploy the website. 
> As mentioned in bug #25227, using CVS could block the implementation of the 
> packages pages as shown in the mockups above (and maybe filtering blog posts 
> by tag) because CVS could choke on the thousands of pages that would be 
> generated (if we keep using a static website).
>
> To find a solution to this issue, Ludovic sent an email to Savannah admins 
> asking for the possibility of using a dynamic website instead. I don't 
> remember if there was an answer.

There was none.

I don’t think we can get the level of support we’d like from the gnu.org
webmasters, who are already swamped.  With Alex S. (Cc’d) and others at
FOSDEM, we discussed this issue and concluded that we should consider
moving the web site to infrastructure we control, where we could do
things in any way we like.

We won’t run a Libreboot-based physical machine for that because with
the current lack of IPMI support, we’d easily end up with downtimes
unacceptable for a web site.  However, we could use some sort of
commercial hosting.

I’m not much of a Web person so you and other Web-savvy people should
consider themselves empowered to come up with a solution.  :-)  We have
some funding that we could probably use for that.

Thoughts?

Thanks,
Ludo’.