Long Term / KDE.org Design Update

Wed Jul 8 18:20:39 UTC 2015

That looks good to me. +1

On Wed, Jul 8, 2015 at 2:33 AM, Andrej Mernik <andrejm at ubuntu.si> wrote:
>> Hello Everyone;
>>
>> My name is Ken Vermette, I'm a member of the VDG and by trade a web
>> designer/developer. We're interested in modernising the kde.org websites
>> and getting the ball rolling on better unifying the sites as a whole. I'm
>> personally willing (and expecting) to invest the time and programming
>> effort required to do this. I know it's obvious, but we'd also like to
>> work
>> closely with the web team.
>>
>> It's a huge undertaking and we know it will easily take years to finish
>> all
>> the sites; we would like to know we aren't stepping on toes, duplicating
>> existing efforts, etc. Before any of that we need the green-light from
>> here, and would also like to invite web-team participation in building a
>> maintainable and more universal kde.org network.
>>
>> Thank you, and great work;
>>   - Ken Vermette
>
> Hi all,
>
> I think a redesign of the kde.org sites is a great idea. Since responsive
> design
> is now a "must have", I suggest building the site upon one of the responsive
> frameworks (for example Bootstrap) rather than building a own responsive
> framework.
> Also the new design should be more consistent. There is no need for inline
> CSS
> as it makes overriding hard, the same thing also holds for internal <style>
> tags.
>
> Although design is important, there is a component that desperately needs a
> rewrite:
> the backend.
>
> I have been digging through code in an attempt to customize one of the kde
> pages and
> it was not a pleasant sight. The main problem of the current design is that
> a lot of
> things are hardcoded. Basically, if you include the header.inc file, you are
> stuck with
> all the things that other sites have. This might be good for the normal
> websites, but as
>  soon as you have to customize a thing (for example add/remove a css file or
> a div),
> you are out of luck. There is no easy way to override things, but with minor
> tweaks
>  this could be achievable, without breaking things.
>
> My proposition is to split the hardcoded content into modules loadable by a
> loading function:
>
> // pseudo code
> function load_module($type, $file, $allow_override = false) {
> if $allow_override == true
>   // look into the current script directory for $file and include it if
> found, return
> else
>   // look into $type for the $file, include it if found, return
> }
>
> example header.inc:
>
> <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN"
>     "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
> <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"  lang="<?php print $site_locale;
> ?>" xml:lang="<?php print $site_locale; ?>">
> <head>
>   <title><?php print $title; ?></title>
>    load_module($document_root, 'meta.inc', false); // meta is loaded but
> cannot be overridden
>   load_module($template_path, 'css.inc', true); css can be overridden by a
> local css.inc file
>   load_module($document_root, 'js.inc', true); js can be overridden by a
> local js.inc file
>   ...
> </head>
> <body>
>   load_module($document_root, 'breadcrumbs.inc', true); breadcrumbs can be
> overridden by a local breadcrumbs.inc file
>   load_module($document_root, 'plasmaMenu.inc', true); menu can be
> overridden by a local plasmaMenu.inc file
>
>   etc.
>   This is (somewhat) the same mechanism that Wordpress child themes use and
> it's really easy to use.
>
> The second problem with the backend is that it's outdated. If you turn on
> error reporting and
> warnings on a server with recent PHP version, the number of messages will
> blow your mind :). If
> there is redesigning being done, why not update the backend to current
> standards? The current
> backend does a good job, but sooner or later it will have to be modernized.
>
> Anyway, these are some things I have noticed by browsing the code. I would
> be happy to help
> improving the frontend/backend, so I'm wondering what is the current status
> of the redesign.
>
> Cheers,
> Andrej
>
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