<div dir="ltr"><div><div><div>Wagh! Sorry I haven't been more active here; my day job has had me on heavy web development for the past few months - you can imagine programming PHP for more than 8 hours a day can send some people screaming to non-web projects, especially when it's not a quick project like the KDE websites. ;)<br><br></div>In all honesty my progress was starry-eyed and a bit crap, I haven't been satisfied with my work at all, and for some reason I thought writing (another) custom CMS was a good idea; I came back to what I had yesterday and set the project folders on fire. Aside from some pretty designs and inconsequential HTML, I'm going to reset my progress meter, because I doubt the whole "lone wolf" thing will get very far on a long-term project like this - especially since my screwups would be your burden - and that thought stressed me out.<br><br></div>I think the most important thing isn't the design aspect, but having a solid foundational CMS which is modern, will be updated, and will allow for easier management. I'd like to maybe just start with your feedback as the maintainers; right now KDE.org has several systems its running under, including Capacity as a sort of "glue" CMS... I'd like to poll you guys on the possibility of picking and sticking with one CMS, even if it means programming a multitude of modules, which I'm willing to do. I also think it's important that you guys choose what you want to maintain, because what's easy to design for isn't necessarily what's easy to maintain.<br><br>I'm also thinking "not custom" since keeping things up-to-date is a tough issue, but with something like Drupal or Wordpress at least we know it will have active maintainers dedicated to the main codebase. If we can just maintain modules in a skinnable multi-language system that will be half the battle won forever and ever. Hopefully, for user-facing pages we'll get our core codebase down to CMS X and PhpBB.<br><br></div><div>Anyway!<br><br></div><div>I think the first thing I'd like to hear from you guys before I re-kick my efforts is; do you agree with my logic, and what CMS would you prefer to maintain if you do?<br></div><div><div><div><div><div><div class="gmail_extra"><br><br><div class="gmail_quote">On Fri, Jul 10, 2015 at 2:23 AM, Andrej Mernik <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:andrejm@ubuntu.si" target="_blank">andrejm@ubuntu.si</a>></span> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">Dne 08. 07. 2015 ob 23:43 je Albert Astals Cid zapisal(a):<div><div><br>
<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">
El Dimecres, 8 de juliol de 2015, a les 10:33:57, Andrej Mernik va escriure:<br>
<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex"><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">
Hello Everyone;<br>
<br>
My name is Ken Vermette, I'm a member of the VDG and by trade a web<br>
designer/developer. We're interested in modernising the <a href="http://kde.org" rel="noreferrer" target="_blank">kde.org</a> websites<br>
and getting the ball rolling on better unifying the sites as a whole. I'm<br>
personally willing (and expecting) to invest the time and programming<br>
effort required to do this. I know it's obvious, but we'd also like to<br>
work<br>
closely with the web team.<br>
<br>
It's a huge undertaking and we know it will easily take years to finish<br>
all<br>
the sites; we would like to know we aren't stepping on toes, duplicating<br>
existing efforts, etc. Before any of that we need the green-light from<br>
here, and would also like to invite web-team participation in building a<br>
maintainable and more universal <a href="http://kde.org" rel="noreferrer" target="_blank">kde.org</a> network.<br>
<br>
Thank you, and great work;<br>
<br>
- Ken Vermette<br>
</blockquote>
Hi all,<br>
<br>
I think a redesign of the <a href="http://kde.org" rel="noreferrer" target="_blank">kde.org</a> sites is a great idea. Since responsive<br>
design is now a "must have", I suggest building the site upon one of the<br>
responsive frameworks (for example Bootstrap) rather than building a own<br>
responsive framework. Also the new design should be more consistent. There<br>
is no need for inline CSS as it makes overriding hard, the same thing also<br>
holds for internal <style> tags.<br>
<br>
Although design is important, there is a component that desperately needs a<br>
rewrite: the backend.<br>
<br>
I have been digging through code in an attempt to customize one of the kde<br>
pages and it was not a pleasant sight. The main problem of the current<br>
design is that a lot of things are hardcoded. Basically, if you include the<br>
header.inc file, you are stuck with all the things that other sites have.<br>
This might be good for the normal websites, but as soon as you have to<br>
customize a thing (for example add/remove a css file or a div), you are out<br>
of luck. There is no easy way to override things, but with minor tweaks<br>
this could be achievable, without breaking things.<br>
<br>
My proposition is to split the hardcoded content into modules loadable by a<br>
loading function:<br>
<br>
// pseudo code<br>
function load_module($type, $file, $allow_override = false) {<br>
if $allow_override == true<br>
// look into the current script directory for $file and include it if<br>
found, return else<br>
// look into $type for the $file, include it if found, return<br>
}<br>
<br>
example header.inc:<br>
<br>
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN"<br>
"<a href="http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd" rel="noreferrer" target="_blank">http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd</a>"><br>
<html xmlns="<a href="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" rel="noreferrer" target="_blank">http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml</a>" lang="<?php print $site_locale;<br>
?>" xml:lang="<?php print $site_locale; ?>"> <head><br>
<title><?php print $title; ?></title><br>
<br>
load_module($document_root, 'meta.inc', false); // meta is loaded but<br>
cannot be overridden load_module($template_path, 'css.inc', true); css can<br>
be overridden by a local css.inc file load_module($document_root, 'js.inc',<br>
true); js can be overridden by a local js.inc file<br>
<br>
...<br>
</head><br>
<body><br>
load_module($document_root, 'breadcrumbs.inc', true); breadcrumbs can be<br>
overridden by a local breadcrumbs.inc file load_module($document_root,<br>
'plasmaMenu.inc', true); menu can be overridden by a local plasmaMenu.inc<br>
file<br>
<br>
etc.<br>
<br>
This is (somewhat) the same mechanism that Wordpress child themes use and<br>
it's really easy to use.<br>
<br>
The second problem with the backend is that it's outdated. If you turn on<br>
error reporting and warnings on a server with recent PHP version, the<br>
number of messages will blow your mind :). If there is redesigning being<br>
done, why not update the backend to current standards? The current backend<br>
does a good job, but sooner or later it will have to be modernized.<br>
<br>
Anyway, these are some things I have noticed by browsing the code. I would<br>
be happy to help improving the frontend/backend, so I'm wondering what is<br>
the current status of the redesign.<br>
</blockquote>
I don't know if anyone is still working on a big redesign for <a href="http://kde.org" rel="noreferrer" target="_blank">kde.org</a> but if<br>
you have patches for capacity to make it more modular we can totally have a<br>
look at them :)<br>
<br>
Cheers,<br>
Albert<br>
<br>
</blockquote></div></div>
I would be happy to do things, however, I would really like to see what has been done until now (if anything). I would also like that the VDG participates in this, so we can plan how the future theme should be structured. I really don't know if it's wise to change the current theme, since some sites depending on it's structure might break. Opinions on this?<div><div><br>
<br>
Cheers,<br>
Andrej<br>
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</div></div></blockquote></div><br></div></div></div></div></div></div></div>