RFC: docs website layout demo

[Jeffrey Fearn]

Hi Paul,

----- Original Message -----
> On Mon, Oct 13, 2014 at 01:12:35AM -0600, Pete Travis wrote:
> > On 10/13/2014 12:34 AM, Jeff Fearn wrote:
> > > On 10/10/2014 08:30 PM, Jeffrey Fearn wrote:
> > > > Hi, Rudi asked me to do a demo of how Fedora could make a
> > > > rebuilt docs website look, so I've made a demo site & tweaked it
> > > > a bit. Before I spend too much effort on it I thought I'd open
> > > > it up for input.
> > >
> > > > I wanted to get a bit more done before the weekend, but time
> > > > slipped away. I wanted to get it out for some feedback over the
> > > > weekend so I can do some more on Monday, so I'd thought I'd just
> > > > put it out there and hope people can understand it is only half
> > > > baked.
> > >
> > > > Some of the stuff I did for this I liked so I've started
> > > > migrating the template changes back in to publican, leaving this
> > > > site with just some colour changes on what a default web_style 2
> > > > site will look like.  I'll update my fedora people site next
> > > > week so show what a default site will look like.
> > >
> > > > I've made a script to pull out most of the docs packages from
> > > > git, and run through a bunch of branches per book, and try to
> > > > build them with the latest publican. I'll make the script
> > > > available next week for people who want to build their own
> > > > copy. It should be useful to QA the process as it spits out a
> > > > log file out for each repo and branch so you can get a good list
> > > > of what's broken and what's not. I'll also put those up on my
> > > > fedora people site next week ... If I have any quota left :D
> > >
> > > I've pushed this on to the demo site [1], comments at the top hold the
> > > instructions.
> > >
> > > It needs tweaks to docsite-publican, hope to get those committed soon.
> > >
> > > It also needs Fedora_Splash which contains the blurb on the Fedora
> > > products page and the groupings, not sure what to do about that.
> > >
> > > It will still work without those things, it just won't look exactly
> > > the same.
> > >
> > > > Demo site is https://jfearn.fedorapeople.org/fdocs/en-US/index.html
> > > > 
> > > > I think this is a pretty good layout
> > > > https://jfearn.fedorapeople.org/fdocs/en-US/index.html#Fedora
> > > > 
> > > > Colours are hard :-/
> > > > 
> > > > Note if you click a group, below the versions, then it filters
> > > > out all the other groups.
> > > > 
> > > > Note that in the "System administration" group for Fedora 20
> > > > there is an external link "The Ways And Means Of Pants" which is
> > > > a fake URL, if you have a couple of examples of real external
> > > > links you'd like in that group, or any other group, I'd be happy
> > > > to swap out the fake one.
> > > > 
> > > > I haven't changed the brand XSL for the html payload, I'd like
> > > > to remove the old left and right logos at the top of the
> > > > pages. They aren't really needed given the menu content.
> > > > 
> > > > e.g.
> > > > https://jfearn.fedorapeople.org/fdocs/en-US/Fedora/20/html/Installation_Guide/index.html
> > > > 
> > > > bah I just noticed a bug on that page, the first two items in
> > > > the navigation menu are swapped ... :(
> > > > 
> > > > I'm sure there are lots more :}
> > > > 
> > > > I've built html, html-single, epub & pdf.
> > > > 
> > > > The site is only in en-US, it's 417M and I'm not sure the
> > > > hosting people would be happy if I hosted more languages :)
> > > > 
> > > > Anyway, it's Friday evening and the wine is calling, please
> > > > reply if you have any ideas or feedback, beware that I'm
> > > > currently hacking on the publican devel branch, so I might steal
> > > > any really cool ideas for publican.next ;)
> > > > 
> > > > Cheers, Jeff.
> > > > 
> > > > P.S. All the RSS feeds on there should work, but you probably do not
> > > want to sign up for that site!
> > >
> > > Cheers, Jeff.
> > >
> > > 1: https://jfearn.fedorapeople.org/fdocs/rebuild_site.sh
> > >
> > Hey Jeff,
> > 
> > I'm exited to see your interest in our Publican site.  We've been trying
> > to build a system with publican-created src.rpms built by koji, and
> > installed to a virtual machine.  The infrastructure part has gone fairly
> > well; any package we push out is automatically installed and the site
> > updated.
> > 
> > The part of the process I've really struggled with is the interaction
> > between the branding, the table of contents stuff, the landing page, the
> > splash (which I wasn't aware of as a discrete document type,) the CSS
> > applied to the toc/landing page/splash, the spec file templates used for
> > landing pages or docs or sites or splashes, the publican.cfg for the
> > landing page or the site settings... well, I'll just say every time I
> > try to work on it, I get lost.  I realize that's a very non-specific
> > problem description, but after hours of working with the existing site,
> > with CSS that people on our team worked out, or just starting a publican
> > site from scratch following your user guide, I don't feel like I'm at
> > the point of even intelligently asking for help.
> > 
> > rkratky and yruseva worked up CSS for a web_style=2 site that I rather
> > like, at
> > https://rkratky.fedorapeople.org/docsweb/mockup/en-US/index.html .  I
> > really like elements from your demo too, like the secondary categories
> > and the format selection icons (although replicating the Adobe logo for
> > PDFs probably should go :P ).  The social media things at the bottom are
> > intriguing; our marketing team would probably like to explore the
> > potential there.
> > 
> > Ideally, I'd like to have all of the components and docs we need tagged
> > into the el6-docs repo, and the site would rebuild by simply installing
> > all the Publican document packages available on a clean virtual
> > machine.  Can you help us put all these pieces together into a
> > replicatable site, or at least talk me through some stumbling blocks
> > sometime?
> 
> Optimally, the Fedora Docs site should have the same look and feel
> that the Design team is doing for other Fedora websites.
>
>  Ryan Lerch
> has been working on an implementation of bootstrap that would unify
> all our Fedora sites/subdomains.  It would be great to see the Docs
> site both use that theme, and also have the docs-specific features
> rkratky, jfearn, et al. are interested to provide.

Ryan is responsible for a reasonable amount of the styling and structure of publican websites and is familiar with the template system it's uses, so it should be doable.

How much work it is depends on how different the style is and how intrusive it needs to be to get it done. e.g. getting publican integrated with the Red Hat portal was a huge investment.

Of course if Ryan wants to avoid all that nasty integration work and wanted to redo the common theme from scratch using bootstrap, so that FDocs only needs some minor tweaking, I'd "begrudgingly" accept that :D

> cc'ing rlerch and mattdm for awareness since I'm not sure either of
> them is on the Docs list.

Cheers, Jeff.