[ocaml-infra] Migrating to the new ocaml.org design

[Amir Chaudhry]

Hi everyone,

I want to reassure everyone that all the content from the old site is still present but there may be broken links, which this review would help to surface. The only page that's been reworked is the front page and we need people in the community to help us to both identify and fill the gaps with the new site.  

To take a specific example, http://ocaml-redesign.github.io/learn/books still exists but isn't linked properly from other pages on the site.  The placeholder for books which Sylvain noticed should ideally be a carousel that cycles through *all* the books we have (with appropriate links) but we don't have that feature yet.  In addition, I'd personally like to submit a review of "OCaml from the very beginning" so this definitely isn't a case of presenting only one view -- In any case, I certainly wouldn't expect such a view to hold very long as anyone is able to contribute and improve content.

Please bear in mind that we're not even on Step 1 of the plan I outlined (though it is a trivial one).  I want to make sure the overall plan seems reasonable and then ensure we capture everything while in Step 3.

Best wishes,
Amir


On 29 Oct 2013, at 11:37, Anil Madhavapeddy <anil at recoil.org> wrote:

> I've re-read Amir's mail and it appears to answer every single one of your
> questions. Could you please take the time to do the same and reply to that
> with your suggested changes?
> 
> -anil
> 
> On 29 Oct 2013, at 11:34, Sylvain Le Gall <sylvain+ocaml at le-gall.net> wrote:
> 
>> I was planning to do some change on the actual forge to make things
>> more clear and fix other things. But is it really a 1:1 re-map between
>> the old design and the new design ?
>> 
>> If I make change to the current will they end up in the new design ?
>> 
>> There was some links in the old design to the forge... like on the first page !
>> 
>> 
>> 2013/10/29 Anil Madhavapeddy <anil at recoil.org>:
>>> Hi Sylvain,
>>> 
>>> If you read Amir's mail below more carefully, you'll see:
>>> 
>>>> As I mentioned in earlier emails, the above is only intended to merge
>>>> the *design* and *toolchain* for the new site.
>>> 
>>> The content on the redesign is a strawman to facilitate the design process,
>>> and the existing content won't change (but will be a lot easier to hack on
>>> with the new Markdown-based toolchain).
>>> 
>>> So -- if you feel that the Forge isn't adequately represented on the existing
>>> ocaml.org site, then you should either create an issue or (preferably) send
>>> in a content patch.  Noone can represent your interests better than you...
>>> 
>>> -anil
>>> 
>>> On 29 Oct 2013, at 11:15, Sylvain Le Gall <sylvain+ocaml at le-gall.net> wrote:
>>> 
>>>> Hi,
>>>> 
>>>> I did a quick review of the pages and I have a few remarks:
>>>> - no mention of the OCaml Forge
>>>> - no mention of Planet OCaml (after all you are extracting news from there)
>>>> - in Packages I would like to title the main section "OPAM packages",
>>>> because that what they are.
>>>> - please add more books than just "Real World OCaml"
>>>> - 2 out of 3 talks from Yaron (I mean I have nothing against Yaron but
>>>> there are other videos around the web).
>>>> - you could add the G+ community for OCaml
>>>> 
>>>> Overall, and I am sorry to say that, but the website is promoting
>>>> quite strongly a single point of view (which look a lot like Jane
>>>> Street/OCamlPro/OCamlLab). Don't forget that there are some OTHER
>>>> people working on things like the OCaml Forge and that may feel that
>>>> it is totally useless since it is not even mentioned into a single
>>>> page of the new site.
>>>> 
>>>> Regards
>>>> Sylvain
>>>> 
>>>> 2013/10/29 Amir Chaudhry <amc79 at cam.ac.uk>:
>>>>> Hi everyone,
>>>>> 
>>>>> Ashish, Christophe, Philippe and I have been discussing the new ocaml.org site design and how we should migrate to it.
>>>>> 
>>>>> You can see the current design up at http://ocaml-redesign.github.io and the idea for merging this into the main site is the following:
>>>>> 
>>>>> 1. We fork the current site into a new branch on the main GitHub repository (the new branch would be called 'redesign').
>>>>> 
>>>>> 2. We clean up and replay our git commits on this new branch.  This gets us to the current redesign site but in an 'official' place.
>>>>> 
>>>>> 3. We build a live version of the redesign branch (like we already have) and ask the community to review it and report any bugs or problems. We triage those bugs to identify any blockers and work on those first.
>>>>> 
>>>>> 4. After one week (7 days), and after blocking bugs have been fixed, we merge the site into the main branch.  This would effectively present the new site to the world.
>>>>> 
>>>>> During the above, we would not be able to accept any new pull requests on the old site but would be happy to accept them on the new branch.  Hence, restricting the time frame to one week.
>>>>> 
>>>>> As I mentioned in earlier emails, the above is only intended to merge the *design* and *toolchain* for the new site.  Specifically, we've created new landing pages, have new style sheets and have restructured the site's contents as well as made some new libraries [1, 2].  The new toolchain means people can write files in markdown, which makes contributing content a lot easier.
>>>>> 
>>>>> Since the files are on GitHub, people don't even need to clone the site locally to make simple edits (or even add new pages). Just click the 'Edit this page' link in the footer to be taken to the right file in the repository and GitHub's editing and pull request features will allow you to make changes and submit updates, all without leaving your browser [3].
>>>>> 
>>>>> There is still work to be done on adding new features but the above changes are already a great improvement to the site and are ready to be reviewed and merged.
>>>>> 
>>>>> [1] http://pw374.github.io/posts/2013-09-05-22-31-26-about-omd.html
>>>>> [2] http://pw374.github.io/posts/2013-10-03-20-39-07-OPAMaging-MPP.html
>>>>> [3] https://help.github.com/articles/creating-and-editing-files-in-your-repository
>>>>> 
>>>>> Best wishes,
>>>>> Amir
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>>> 
>> 
>