Long Term / KDE.org Design Update

[Ken Vermette]

Excellent; I'm quite excited to see support for an effort to overhaul the
sites.

It's very likely that I'm going to try to organise the bulk of the effort
onto the forums; we have a lot of disparate pages and sections which need
individual handling, and there may be a *lot* of chatter as the process
picks up over time. With the forum being the main working area, I could see
the mailing list being more of an implementation, staging, and targeting
area where we keep an eye on the big picture. There's no specific mailing
list.

On a side note, I'd also like to use the forums for keeping the lid on
foundational work. Until we know what our deliverables might look like, I'd
hate to see the web development stall out because of bikeshedding; once we
have some momentum it'll be nice to bring the wider community in for
content. I also want to avoid too much reporting on in-development versions
in case features are cut or design shift occur.

On the fact that swaths of kde.org are far outdated, I actually view this
as a minor benefit for redesign efforts; in areas where the content is
severely out-of-date it gives us much more freedom to do what we need. It
may also give us chances to streamline the website, or defer certain pages
until we have the chance to place them in better locations.

With launching the redesigned pages, I'm thinking we start with the VDG
area first; the VDG is more than happy to guinea-pig the design, and
ultimately if people take issue it we'll have a much easier time handling
feedback. Also, the VDG site isn't 'connected' to anything with dynamic
content, so we can experiment in a more static environment before things
get complicated. I don't want to hit kde.org proper right away, I'd like to
target one or two smaller sites while we iron out issues.

@Ingo Malchow

> I was once starting to implement the design mockup that came out of the
> thread
> about revisiting the okular website
> (https://forum.kde.org/viewtopic.php?f=285&t=123233), but then i got busy
> in
> real life and considering i was doing it alone i did not see much
> motivation
> in it for the time being. Seeing the VDG stepping up might give this a
> motivation boost :P
>
> We have built some resources that would make it a bit easier to make themes
> for most of the software that is in use.
>
> There is a lot to consider/share, so if you want to talk about it, feel
> free
> to give me time and date, so we can have a chat via irc or something.
>

I recall the Okular design... I think a major thing that worried me from
the outset of that project was the fact that there was never any backbone
for you to build off of; part of my motivation for this is to lay the
groundwork for actually applying a (similar) level of design to most
applications. I think that's why I didn't invest as much effort as I should
have on the Okular site; even if we finished, we still would have been
stuck maintaining a radically different header from everything else - and
it would have been just terrible maintenance-wise. It was a bit frustrating
because every time the conversation turned to something more 'lasting' we
had to isolate ourselves.

One thing I want to do is make certain portions of pages (header, footer)
pull the majority of their data from a central source, e.g. "media.kde.org",
"global.kde.org", "internal.kde.org" - something like that. If we did this,
it would basically let us keep all headers/footers up-to-date across all
websites regardless of CMS or server. If you check out any of the Apple
website pages, they do the same thing with "images.apple.com".

Ingo, while I have you, would you be willing to create a (hidden) forum for
website development? If people here are down with the forum, I'd be willing
to get the ball rolling.


Anywho, thank you for the positive reception; I'm looking forward to
getting started. Once we figure out where we'll hold the majority of the
discussions, I'll post my current target designs. :)
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