[Gimp-web] Status Update on Redesign

[Pat David <patdavid gmail com>]

Sorry, I think I accidentally sent the previous email prematurely (hold the
jokes)...

Also, including gimp-dev on this to get it to a broader audience.

Just a small status update on the new site.

I _think_ the new infrastructure is done.  I haven't had to do any further
tweaks to it so far, and it appears that the functionality we may be
looking for is all there.

The old site structure is still intact, old URI's will still work
everywhere that I can tell (except for pages that I haven't ported yet -
but that's just grunt work at this point).  New page creation and source
dir mirroring all seem to work ok.

News posts get permalinks and are accessible from an aggregate page (
http://static.gimp.org/news/).  We can also embed any number of news posts
on other pages as needed (more on this later).  They all get a permalink
for direct linking:
http://static.gimp.org/news/2015/05/27/gimp-projects-official-statement-on-sourceforges-actions/,
which is a nice change (we can also now have an aggregate by author and all
sorts of neatness inherent in using Pelican to generate the site).

Translations
Translations appear to be working fine at the moment, through my limited
testing.  The incorporation of the i18n_subsites plugin for Pelican now
allows the site generator to create a complete subsite for different
languages.
static.gimp.org/about/meta/
static.gimp.org/fr/about/meta/
static.gimp.org/de/about/meta/

What's nice is that if you have a page that hasn't been translated yet,
links will still work fine, but showing the default lang (en) instead.
This can be tested by visiting the French test page, and then navigating to
any other page.  You'll still be on the sub-site, but served default lang
pages if no translation exists:
http://static.gimp.org/fr/about/meta/translations.html
Then navigate to any other page.  You'll see you are still on the subsite (
gimp.org/fr/...), but being served default lang pages (en).

The i18n_subsites plugin also supports full translation of the templates
for the rest of the site (beyond just content).  I haven't tested these all
the way yet, but don't anticipate there should be a problem.  I'll report
back on this later.

The Front Page
I have been tinkering with the layout of the front page.  I still need
input or verbiage describing some of the sections, and some opinions on a
couple of things.

1. Should we include news items higher up on the page?  I am not quite sure
how best to incorporate news items on the main page.  Possibly as a small
list of headlines to latest posts?  Only the most recent post + a link to
the "News" archive page?  Any thoughts on this?

2. I was thinking about highlighting the fact that GIMP is extensible
through scripts and plug-ins.  Any input on this that I can add to a
section on the front page?

Downloads Page
I'm a bit conflicted about this.  I understand that we used to use jquery
to try and guess the OS the visitor was on, and present them with a
sub-section of the downloads page.

I am almost thinking that perhaps we can simply present users with clearly
marked links at the top of the Downloads page to choose which OS they would
like a download for?  Any objections to going this route?

Markdown/rst/html/asciidoc
Per Marco's comments, we can also use restructured text, plain html, or
possibly asciidoc directly.  I have to check on asciidoc support (Marco
gave us a link earlier, but it seemed a bit convoluted).  If it's a
must-have, we can always put together an asciidoc pre-processor for Pelican
to convert the files.


Release
So, I'm curious.  Is there anything else anyone thinks we should square
away before possibly switching over to the new site?
Technically, it appears to me that we only need to:

A) finish the front page layout/style/text.
B) finish porting old pages, like tutorials.

Does this sound about right?
pat