Long Term / KDE.org Design Update

Wed Jul 8 21:43:57 UTC 2015

El Dimecres, 8 de juliol de 2015, a les 10:33:57, Andrej Mernik va escriure:
> > 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.

I don't know if anyone is still working on a big redesign for kde.org but if 
you have patches for capacity to make it more modular we can totally have a 
look at them :)

Cheers,
  Albert

> 
> Cheers,
> Andrej
> 
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