Long Term / KDE.org Design Update

Fri Jul 10 06:23:11 UTC 2015

Dne 08. 07. 2015 ob 23:43 je Albert Astals Cid zapisal(a):
> 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
>
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?

Cheers,
Andrej