Long Term / KDE.org Design Update

[Ben Cooksley]

On Tue, Mar 24, 2015 at 9:52 AM, Ken Vermette <vermette at gmail.com> wrote:
> Excellent; I'm quite excited to see support for an effort to overhaul the
> sites.

Hi Ken,

>
> 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 On the fact that swaths of kde.org are far outdated, I actually view this as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 out-of-date it gives us much more freedom to do what we need.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.

That sounds like a good idea to me.

>
> @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".

That sounds like a good idea, we already have cdn.kde.org which can
kind of do what you're after.
Would you do the same with shared Javascript / CSS resources?

>
> 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.

Send a mail to forum-admin at kde.org and we'll sort you out there.

>
>
> 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. :)
>

Thanks,
Ben

>
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