[Website] Proposal for a major change in the Website

[Christofer Dutz <ch...@c-ware.de>]

Hi all,

for the past days I have been working on a proposal for a new site skin for the PLC4X website.
It’s currently still quite ugly, but I have been concentrating on restructuring things and learning bootstrap.

But before working more on this, I wanted to discuss some ideas I had.

I would like to get rid of the menu we currently have as for me it’s sort of not that good to get an overview.
Instead I would like to split up the project into 4 sections:

  *   Home (Flashy, Shiny, landing page that people from the industry might find appealing)
  *   Users (Information Users would be looking for with information on how to use the API and all of the integration modules and the tools (scraper, connection-pool, opm))
  *   Devlopers (Information for people that want to build PLC4X, build own driver and contribute to the project
  *   Apache (Information on Apache – this is required and not optional (I think))

This is not that much different than it was before (I removed the “protocols” section this might be better located in the developer section and ideally most of its content could be generated in the future with a asciidoc generation template)

What I did do, is change the top navigation menu into a very simple 4-button menu to select the section of the website.
If a section has a sub-menu, a static navigation menu with all of its options is displayed left of the page content (or above in mobile mode)
If there is no sub-menu, the page is shown without a navigation menu and the content spreads to 100% width of the browser window (this is I think a requirement for these modern never-ending scroll-down-forever pages.

I think only the home and possibly the apache page should be one of these hand-crafted HTML pages. The content needs to be created for maximum impression at the user and will hopefully be quite static.
The other pages would be generated the way we have been doing all the time. I think our current tooling is the ideal compromise of expressiveness and simplicity.

I wouldn’t want to introduce and integrate yet another tool. After all, all of these tools just handle the visual presentation and not the content and content is what we need to work on.

You can check what I have been doing by going to the build-tools repo cd into the plc4x-site-skin directory and run “mvn clean install -P run-its” … a copy of the current site content is an integration test for the skin.
So after running that build, you can see the result in plc4x-site-skin/target/its/plc4x-website/target/site.


What do you think?

Chris

Re: [Website] Proposal for a major change in the Website

[Christofer Dutz <ch...@c-ware.de>]

Hi Niclas,

the styling of everything except the Navigation and the menu on the side are still the default ones generated from the archetype ... I'm sort of working myself down from the most challenging parts to the simpler parts ... help here is super-duper-mega-appreciated ;-)

Chris


Am 18.01.20, 10:38 schrieb "Niklas Merz" <ni...@apache.org>:

    Hi all,
    
    This skin is step in the right direction for. A big +1.
    
    I tried out the new site skin and I like it. The new structure with
    Home, User, Dev, Apache is a huge step forward. The old top menu
    confused me a lot. Also the static navigation on the left of these pages
    is much better to use than the old one with mouseover.
    
    The integration test was building fast for me and was easy to use with
    your instructions, so the tooling seems to be perfectly fine.
    
    One little issue I found (at least for the integration test), is that
    the browser tab title is "PLC4X -" on every page.
    
    
    @Chris The styling is probably just temporary now, but one I thing I
    thought right away that the background and border around all headline
    makes this look old fashioned. I removed it and it looked better to me
    right away. See https://github.com/apache/plc4x-build-tools/pull/1. All
    in all I like this "plain" and "clean" look. It's basic and does it job
    well, so there is no need for fancy UI stuff. Having a fast site is very
    important, too.
    
    I am no design guru myself, but I am happy to give feedback :-).
    
    Kind regards
    Niklas
    
    
    Am 17.01.20 um 10:18 schrieb Christofer Dutz:
    > Hi all,
    > 
    > for the past days I have been working on a proposal for a new site skin for the PLC4X website.
    > It’s currently still quite ugly, but I have been concentrating on restructuring things and learning bootstrap.
    > 
    > But before working more on this, I wanted to discuss some ideas I had.
    > 
    > I would like to get rid of the menu we currently have as for me it’s sort of not that good to get an overview.
    > Instead I would like to split up the project into 4 sections:
    > 
    >   *   Home (Flashy, Shiny, landing page that people from the industry might find appealing)
    >   *   Users (Information Users would be looking for with information on how to use the API and all of the integration modules and the tools (scraper, connection-pool, opm))
    >   *   Devlopers (Information for people that want to build PLC4X, build own driver and contribute to the project
    >   *   Apache (Information on Apache – this is required and not optional (I think))
    > 
    > This is not that much different than it was before (I removed the “protocols” section this might be better located in the developer section and ideally most of its content could be generated in the future with a asciidoc generation template)
    > 
    > What I did do, is change the top navigation menu into a very simple 4-button menu to select the section of the website.
    > If a section has a sub-menu, a static navigation menu with all of its options is displayed left of the page content (or above in mobile mode)
    > If there is no sub-menu, the page is shown without a navigation menu and the content spreads to 100% width of the browser window (this is I think a requirement for these modern never-ending scroll-down-forever pages.
    > 
    > I think only the home and possibly the apache page should be one of these hand-crafted HTML pages. The content needs to be created for maximum impression at the user and will hopefully be quite static.
    > The other pages would be generated the way we have been doing all the time. I think our current tooling is the ideal compromise of expressiveness and simplicity.
    > 
    > I wouldn’t want to introduce and integrate yet another tool. After all, all of these tools just handle the visual presentation and not the content and content is what we need to work on.
    > 
    > You can check what I have been doing by going to the build-tools repo cd into the plc4x-site-skin directory and run “mvn clean install -P run-its” … a copy of the current site content is an integration test for the skin.
    > So after running that build, you can see the result in plc4x-site-skin/target/its/plc4x-website/target/site.
    > 
    > 
    > What do you think?
    > 
    > Chris
    > 
    

Re: [Website] Proposal for a major change in the Website

[Niklas Merz <ni...@apache.org>]

Hi all,

This skin is step in the right direction for. A big +1.

I tried out the new site skin and I like it. The new structure with
Home, User, Dev, Apache is a huge step forward. The old top menu
confused me a lot. Also the static navigation on the left of these pages
is much better to use than the old one with mouseover.

The integration test was building fast for me and was easy to use with
your instructions, so the tooling seems to be perfectly fine.

One little issue I found (at least for the integration test), is that
the browser tab title is "PLC4X -" on every page.


@Chris The styling is probably just temporary now, but one I thing I
thought right away that the background and border around all headline
makes this look old fashioned. I removed it and it looked better to me
right away. See https://github.com/apache/plc4x-build-tools/pull/1. All
in all I like this "plain" and "clean" look. It's basic and does it job
well, so there is no need for fancy UI stuff. Having a fast site is very
important, too.

I am no design guru myself, but I am happy to give feedback :-).

Kind regards
Niklas


Am 17.01.20 um 10:18 schrieb Christofer Dutz:
> Hi all,
> 
> for the past days I have been working on a proposal for a new site skin for the PLC4X website.
> It’s currently still quite ugly, but I have been concentrating on restructuring things and learning bootstrap.
> 
> But before working more on this, I wanted to discuss some ideas I had.
> 
> I would like to get rid of the menu we currently have as for me it’s sort of not that good to get an overview.
> Instead I would like to split up the project into 4 sections:
> 
>   *   Home (Flashy, Shiny, landing page that people from the industry might find appealing)
>   *   Users (Information Users would be looking for with information on how to use the API and all of the integration modules and the tools (scraper, connection-pool, opm))
>   *   Devlopers (Information for people that want to build PLC4X, build own driver and contribute to the project
>   *   Apache (Information on Apache – this is required and not optional (I think))
> 
> This is not that much different than it was before (I removed the “protocols” section this might be better located in the developer section and ideally most of its content could be generated in the future with a asciidoc generation template)
> 
> What I did do, is change the top navigation menu into a very simple 4-button menu to select the section of the website.
> If a section has a sub-menu, a static navigation menu with all of its options is displayed left of the page content (or above in mobile mode)
> If there is no sub-menu, the page is shown without a navigation menu and the content spreads to 100% width of the browser window (this is I think a requirement for these modern never-ending scroll-down-forever pages.
> 
> I think only the home and possibly the apache page should be one of these hand-crafted HTML pages. The content needs to be created for maximum impression at the user and will hopefully be quite static.
> The other pages would be generated the way we have been doing all the time. I think our current tooling is the ideal compromise of expressiveness and simplicity.
> 
> I wouldn’t want to introduce and integrate yet another tool. After all, all of these tools just handle the visual presentation and not the content and content is what we need to work on.
> 
> You can check what I have been doing by going to the build-tools repo cd into the plc4x-site-skin directory and run “mvn clean install -P run-its” … a copy of the current site content is an integration test for the skin.
> So after running that build, you can see the result in plc4x-site-skin/target/its/plc4x-website/target/site.
> 
> 
> What do you think?
> 
> Chris
>