[postgis-devel] Website Redo change to Hugo

[Regina Obe]

If you'd like to help out with the layout I'm open to all of you doing that.
Especially Martin and Paul cause I love their sense of aesthetics.

The new site code is here -- 

https://git.osgeo.org/gitea/postgis/postgis.net/src/branch/hugo

Any changes you make should show up within 5 minutes on
https://staging.postgis.net

Right now I have it just as a cron job like the old site, but was thinking
we could change it to a CI job later and  also publish this repo across all
our mirrors to make it easier for people to contribute.

I'm responding to all of you in one email. Comments below

> On Thu, Mar 03, 2022 at 01:14:44PM -0500, Regina Obe wrote:
> > https://staging.postgis.net
> 
> Thanks for the great work, but do you think we can find a different theme
? I
> find the current layout hard to understand and navigate, I really don't
see
> the "clarity" expressed in the theme name...
> 
> --strk;
[Regina Obe] 
I picked the theme that wouldn't require me to restructure things too much
and also allowed for the old features of tags and such that I really loved
about the old site.
I also wanted a theme I could actually understand what the creator of the
theme is doing and easily override if I didn't like it.
If you notice I already overwrote a bunch of the css and layouts from the
clarity theme.

Other themes I looked at (I lost track of how many I looked at probably at
least 10)  I found 1 or more issues with then which fell into the following
categories

1) Just couldn't get to work at all
2) Looked hard to maintain or hard to get our existing content into
3) Lacked some of the features out of the box our old site had.  Main one
the ease with navigating tags. 
4) Looked like everyone else, perhaps because they were too popular.  I HATE
looking like everyone else.

> Great to have the website switched to a modern maintainable platform.

> Not sure it's a great idea to keep the 2-column layout though. 
>  It doesn't seem to be responsive, and I find it visually a bit confusing.
> Martin

The 2 column thing did not exist in the theme.  I added that with a 2-column
short-code to mimic our old site.
I'm fine with getting rid of that.  It was bugging me that I couldn't figure
out the CSS magic to make it responsive.

> I think it's great we are getting improved infrastructure,
>  I know the old framework has been limping for quite a while. 
> I agree the information architecture and aesthetics need some love, 
> but also know it's a lot of slogging and very much a doocracy kind of a
thing: question, 
> would you feel put out if at some point in the future I re-orged and
re-themed things?
> Paul Ramsey

If you did it no.  I think your sense of aesthetics are way better than
mine.  
So have at it.  But I want something that stands out from everyone else like
our old site did.
So no ReadTheDocs theme - I know ReadTheDocs is nice but I reiterate I DO
NOT WANT TO LOOK LIKE EVERYONE ELSE.
A world where everyone looks and acts the same is a very depressing world.

> The GRASS theme seems to have a lot of nice features for more advanced
> layout (e.g. right sidebars, left-side sticky menus, image placement, and
> no doubt other cool stuff.).  Perhaps we can use that theme? With some
> suitable design tweaks, of course.  It is nice to give the main docs and
> the website some similar design cues (e.g. like header background)
> Martin

I had started off trying to apply the Grass theme, but under the hood it was
very complicated, lots of things hard-coded where I felt they shouldn't be
and ohhh so much code. So I gave up on it.

>  I had a brief click around.   Overall I found it easy to find content,
>  and didn't have a lot of goop.    I did find the 2-column thing a bit
>  odd as some pages have two content columns and some have an index in the
>  2nd, but it made sense and it didn't bother me.
> Greg Troxel

I'm fine with letting go of the two column.  Yah as mentioned about I really
wanted it to work, but couldn't get it to do what I wanted.
Which is to collapse to one column on a phone and some of the pages felt
painfully long as one column.

>  It seems to load something from googletagmanager.com and that seems like
>  a wrong thing to do.  But I can't find the privacy policy to see if it's
>  against it :-( But seriously, I'm just trying to say that web sites of
>  Free Software projects should not ask users' browsers to load objects
>  from advertising companies.  I'm guessing this is some (buggy) default
>  in the theme.

I think our old one did load stuff from google analytics.  You didn't see
the same issue on the old site?
But agree if we are going to do that, we need to have a privacy policy in
place to state that.

Thanks,
Regina