Introduction
Fedora 21 will be much different than the previous releases and therefore also the websites will get a restyling. We decided to redesign all the pages of http://fedoraproject.org and to use bootstrap, in order to make them responsive for all devices. Here are the main topics:
- Target: Fedora 21 GA release date
- Branch: getfedora
- Format: bootstrap (already recompiled from source), responsive
What we keep, what will be new
Builder
We will keep using our actual builder, that means we will keep all build directory scripts, makefiles, tools and I18n scripts. The new websites will be completely different only for the layout, not for Infra.
Internationalization
We need to markup all our new text contents with Genshi for the L10n teams. F21 will still be on Transifex, moving to Zanata will not happen before F22. We also need to have a new language selector on the page, idea is to adapt the selector of https://translatewiki.net/ to our page and to use it.
Pages: let's renew the content
We decided to drop all pages we can't maintain regularly, these are all features and using pages, while Community and Help should be rewritten to fit the new layout. The Community section also will be split into team-specific subpages, called hubs.
Design: banner, logo, other artwork
New layout means also new logos and we have already the new logos for the three products. We will need many new artwork to make the pages nice and should work very close to the Design team to make this happen.
Repository
It's not a priority, but our repo is too large. It might be a good occasion to archive the old repo and to create a new clean repository with the new layout and including only the static files (mainly images) we really are using.
New website structure
Actually the main http://fedoraproject.org page is our landing page. The idea is to change this and to make a new landing page (brochure) under http://get.fedoraproject.org, product specific pages and community hubs (i.e. http://hub.fedoraproject.org/design). Under these three main categories we will have several subpages which will complete the Fedora Main Website.
All pages will have a template for the header and another for the footer, in order to write them only once and to have always the same header and footer (yes, we want to extend the design also to the other websites). More details:
Please remember that the pages were realized before knowing any detail of the Products, so the actual get-prerelase pages will give you a better idea of what we probably need to include for the final layout.
Brochure
So that will be our new landing page, it should have a clear jumbotron on the top, the three products as main content and maybe some other (important) informations for people who are coming to our main webpage. The page must be clear and easy to understand, if we miss this priority people will find the website not useful and go away (probably also leave the idea to use Fedora). I did a first mockup in the dev branch under /get-fedora.
Product pages
The three main Product pages (which can become more in the future) and their subpages will contain the main content of the new websites. Every Product will have very different needs for different usecases, every single product also will have different content, for example Cloud will need a dedicated page for Public Cloud and another one for Atomic and Docker, while Server and Workstation will have others; it's important to connect all these pages the right way and facilitate the user to understand what he can achieve with which image.
You can have a look at /workstation to have an idea of what we could have as a product page.
Community Hub
The first idea of a hub was to create a sort of personal page for each user and to display user specific informations in the contributor hub. This will not be possible and the evolution of that idea is to make just contributor hubs. A very nice mockup is here on the right.
We can gather most of this data using datagrepper, but unfortunately it's too slow for the builder and would fail. We can use a sort of memcache to resolve this, but it need a bit of scripting. Anyway, the hubs are not a priority and we don't want to have more than 2 (max 3) hubs for Fedora 21.
Events
It would be nice to put also an event page under the community section. This page should contain all the events per Region and also include fudcon.fpo, which actually is not a page users are using. To realize that we need to tell all Regions that it will be a must to set the events on Fedocal, in order to parse the data from there and use it on the websites.
Other topics and ideas
start.fpo
We have some rough mockups and ideas for refreshing start.fpo here. The main thing folks have suggested (in some mailing list threads) changing at a minimum is to change the feed from planet fedora to fedora magazine I think. https://fedorahosted.org/design-team/ticket/334
Spins
Spins will be identified as alternative downloads, but we still have our http://spins.fedoraproject.org page. In the future (F22) we could think about redesign also spins.fpo.
Fedoracommunity
Another site that is pretty unused, unless we include it into the community section of the new websites. I think including (and redesigning) fcomm there, will also give local communities a chance to be more visible for local users.
Action Plan towards F21 final release
We don't have much time left and therefore need to set some priorities to have the webpages go smoothly into the new layout. Within these main topics we have must-have tasks and then there are others, let's call them nice-to-have tasks.
Must have tasks
- Main Product brochure under getfedora.org
- Header and footer template
- Product pages under getfedora.org/$PRODUCT
- Download page under getfedora.org/$PRODUCT/download, which should contain also checksums and verify info
- Spins, ARM and Live Images under http://spins.fedoraproject.org (easyfix task)
- Dedicated page for Public Cloud images
- RTL CSS (see https://github.com/morteza/bootstrap-rtl)
- Keep all our scripts running and clean up the fp.o tree
Nice to have tasks
- New Language selector, see http://translatewiki.net
- At least one hub, also without login feature
Work to do with other teams
- Ask for text content ASAP, we must have it soon for L10n (see pre-release text content too)
- Redirects, getfedora domain and new repository (Infra)
- Datagrepper scripts to memcache for hub data
It's probably wise to concentrate the work on the main tasks, release Fedora 21 and after it move the wepages to a new clean repository. At that point we should start working on spins.fpo and then move on to the other sites (start, fudcon, fcomm). The hubs could be a complementary work.