On Friday, 18 April 2014 at 15:30:52 UTC, David Gileadi wrote:
As the guy who was mostly responsible for the current look and
feel of the website I can provide some insight into the effort
required. The website is built using DDoc[1], and anyone who
wants to change the look and feel will need to learn it. It's
not difficult. It does mean that the site is static HTML, so
any dynamism needs to be JS-only (and I think any efforts to
make the pages largely JS-driven would meet resistance).
I know about DDoc usage, I already know it and using it, so that
wouldn't be the issue.
Regarding the dynamism, I would definitely go with some
JavaScript for
the search feature (I want to provide real-time
filtering/suggestions something like DevDocs[1]) but I would make
it optional (so that search is still usable with JS
disabled/unavailable).
What was a little weird was trying to use DDoc to expand" the
navigation tree when you're on a subpage of a main category.
The original website listed every single page in the sidebar,
which made the sidebar extremely unwieldy. Due to DDoc
limitations I ended up having to put a CATEGORY_FOO macro in
each page in the site, where the FOO is one of the categories
in the sidebar. You may be able to figure out a better way.
Just fork the site on github[2] and experiment!
Ahh I remember that lengthy sidebar, kudos for fixing it!
Also note that there's a movement to make at least part of the
website (the Phobos docs) use a different documentation
generator, so the new look would need to be ported to that too.
I suspect that wouldn't be hard.
I wasn't aware of that, do you by any chance have links to those
threads?
Be aware that the current Tweets sidebar on the main page may
be hard to get rid of; I noticed it wasn't in your mockup :)
Yeah, I've forgot about that (I'm using extensions to disable ads
and those "social" boxes so I forgot that thing exists).
Based on the last go-around there would be some work required
from Walter and Andrei, but assuming you're implementing the
new look and feel then their work would be mostly related to
pushing changes to a beta site and then to the main site. They
can probably speak better to the amount of effort they'd need
to put in. If you're not doing the work of implementing the new
look and feel then I suspect this proposal is dead on arrival
unless someone else steps up to help.
Yep, I'm planning of implementing new look and feel myself.
Of course any help would be very appreciated!
Finally I like your look; I think it would be worth refining
and pursuing. I make no claim to be a graphic designer and I'm
certainly not offended by any criticism of the current look; at
the time I had two goals; 1) look better than the previous site
at digitalmars.com and 2) tame the massive sidebar into
something more reasonable. I think they both succeeded but I'm
very aware that things can look better.
Thanks! It is just a mockup I made in an hour or so, I would like
to have some real designer(s) involved in this to make it really
better.
The current design is waaay better than what we had before and I
thank you
on that! That change was really refreshing.
I just think that we should keep pushing forward. And I would
also like if
you could be able to join me in a new redesign (if it gets
approval), at least
in a consulting role. :)
[1] http://devdocs.io/
