Websites going forward
Good day, websites list!
As time goes on and requirements change, I've found that as I've been
leading the websites updates for the past several releases, they have
gotten to a point where they aren't scaling very well. I don't purely
mean from a technical standpoint.
We've had the same websites setup for a lot of years now, and over
time various "hacks" have been included in our scripts and templates.
Things that were meant to last for one release, but ended up lasting
indefinitely, for example. In addition, we've had the same landing
site templates on our sites for a few years now, and visually, it's
perhaps time for a change.
So what I'd like to propose is a redo of the websites repo as we know
it. I've written up a very rough draft specification [1] that outlines
some of my ideas as well as some ideas from Ryan Lerch. This
specification is certainly not set in stone, and is not complete yet.
However, I wanted to throw it out to the list and ask for comments.
It is largely broken into two key sections: Backend work and frontend work.
On the backend, I believe we could benefit from looking at modern
static website generators and shifting from our custom solution to
something newer and better supported. As stretch goals, we could also
look at the infrastructure side of things and change up how
deployments work. However, that might be out of scope for the first go
at this spec.
On the frontend, I have suggested working closely with Ryan and the
design team to have a small set of templates/themes that sites
inherit, which provide a modern and unified look across all of our
landing sites.
I think there are many advantages to doing this and it provides a
great opportunity to rethink our tooling and processes here. However,
it is vital to both myself and to the project that this be a community
effort.
I would love to hear thoughts on what I have written so far,
suggestions for tooling (static site generators?) that we as a team
should be considering (short experience reports are useful here), or
any other feedback that anyone has to make this work as well as it
can. Our websites provide users with a first look at who and what the
Project is and what we stand for. I feel that leveraging that
appropriately can lead to great things for the Project and help to
spotlight the technologies being focused on by various teams.
Let's revitalize our Project's websites!
Rick
[1] https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Infrastructure_2020/Websites