KDevelop website

[Kevin Funk]

On Sunday, 14 February 2021 13:02:02 CET Carl Schwan wrote:
> ‐‐‐‐‐‐‐ Original Message ‐‐‐‐‐‐‐
> 
> Le dimanche, février 14, 2021 1:06 AM, Sven Brauch <mail at svenbrauch.de> a 
écrit :
> > Hi,
> > 
> > On 2/14/21 12:53 AM, Carl Schwan wrote:
> > > I just have a small requirement, can we port the website to
> > > Hugo during that process?
> > 
> > Getting away from Drupal 7 would certainly be amazing! I'm personally
> > not very happy with Drupal overall anyways, don't know about the others
> > who occasionally edit that website. (I don't remember Kevin being a fan
> > either, though.) But in any case, support for Drupal 7 ends in a few
> > months and we have to move away.
> 
> I thought the Kdevelop website was using Drupal 8 that is still getting
> EOL in November 2021.

Heya,

Yep. Drupal 8.

> > Layout-wise, I don't think the current site is absolutely terrible, I
> > think it contains the needed information in a reasonably organized way.
> > The presentation certainly has its weaknesses though, so if you are
> > motivated, it is from my point of view much appreciated if you come up
> > with something better!
> 
> Yes the current website is not bad. The big weakness in my opinion is the
> homepage. It is showing a big list of screenshots and I think an good and
> simple improvement would be to replace those with the feature page, since it
> gives a better overview of all features (and is a lot faster to load). The
> text on the homepage should be left aligned instead of centered.

Just as a reminder how the KDevelop website looked a couple years ago:
  https://codecondo.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/kdevelop.png :)

I think we've made a huge step into the right way given our current layout. 
Fully agree with Sven's sentiment here: I think the layout is generally fine, 
but design-wise it could be polished here and there. Just some ideas I have 
off the top of my head:

- The KDevelop screenshots on the home page are not entirely crisp, for 
instance the first one -- they've been recorded with increased font size and 
bad font hinting iiuc -- should be replaced/updated
- As you mentioned: the Features page should probably be merged into the home 
page, and prettified 

I'm not a big fan of Drupal myself, as Sven mentioned. I won't go into details 
right now (I just can't remember where all the problems were), but it feels 
like Drupal is oversized for the couple static pages we serve at kdevelop.org. 
Plus we disabled the comment sections a while ago, too (probably one of the 
main reasons where Drupal was still useful) b/c the contents didn't really 
provide value. We'd like people to comment on Reddit/Hackernews/KDE Forums or 
wherever the blog posts are promoted.

> This simple changes could be made without any change to the backend or
> the theme. So if anyone with access to the drupal instance want to make
> them, it would be nice. Bigger changes will need more work.

Just had a look at the Kate website and I'm really blown away. Great work on 
that one! And I love the tight coupling to the KDE eco system in the footer 
bar.

If you could replace kdevelop.org with something easier to maintain (and which 
is being used by other KDE product websites anyway), I'm all for it. The Kate 
website & KDevelop are very similar layout-wise anyway (that's because I stole 
their layout when introducing the KDevelop website layout, heh). 

Obviously we would need to keep the old links to the individual blog posts 
working, but I guess that's possible via redirects / URL rewrites, whatever.

Nice work, Carl!

Regards,
Kevin


> Regards,
> 
> Carl
> 
> > All the best,
> > Sven


-- 
Kevin Funk | kfunk at kde.org | http://kfunk.org
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