Hi Rohit, Thanks for doing the heavy lifting. Great that we have the most important things migrated. Now it is time for some polishing on top according to me. I would object migrating and launching the website and blog as it is now. The thing which worries me is that it really looks like a PoC and not completed work, which will be bad for our reputations. Plus it is obvious it is a new website/CMS (it definitely does not look the same as the old one). So from outside it looks like “CloudStack has a new website and it’s worse than their old now, which has not been changed in the last 10 years”.
As an action plan I suggest we do the following: - implement a new design on the home page - I can prepare few background images + icons + some additional info for 2-3 more sections - consider the fonts of the whole website - change the footer - it is huge now and on some pages t is 1/3 of the page. - rearrange a bit some internal pages - the ones for features, so that it can represent better the project capabilities. - considering the new look, we would need to match the use cases pages to it. Shall we do this together to discuss how to arrange them? - can we align the logo of ACS in the menu on top and the content like shown in the image below. We need to have all of the content on all pages aligned in the same way? [cid:88EA3183-D483-4305-AD40-6704074893F3] - https://beautiful-pastelito-4eb422.netlify.app/who - this page has bugs on top - on the page:https://beautiful-pastelito-4eb422.netlify.app/features The column on the right side is not needed, so we can remove it. Again we can add some header banner, to look more organised. Please, provide the size needed. [cid:8C53FDAF-36CC-4597-8907-D19D9C2C0FCC] - We have a huge footer currently. Considering that most of the pages are short in content, I would suggest we keep the existing footer content on the old website, but just ad a dark background to it as you have done. - As for the blog - this needs to be a single button in the main menu without dropdown. When a user clicks it, he needs to be redirected to the main blog page. On the place of Recent Blogs, please put the blog categories: [cid:1D57043F-4A93-4475-A901-B93A76788596] These are the immediate changes I see now. IMO we need to be careful what we launch and how it looks as this can affect the overall perception for the project and its development. Kind regards, On 1 May 2023, at 8:54, Rohit Yadav <rohit.ya...@shapeblue.com<mailto:rohit.ya...@shapeblue.com>> wrote: All, The ASF infra has advised deprecating and removing Roller support by 31st May 2023, our project blog is based on Roller. Since my previous mail, I have been reviewing alternatives and options that are compliant with ASF policies and have looked at several other top-level Apache projects on how they manage, maintain, and publish their websites and blogs. For reference, some of that progress and options have been discussed at https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/INFRA-24170 In order to have an ASF-compliant website and blog setup that would be more inclusive for our non-technical contributors, I've set up a proof-of-concept blog+website [1] using Docusauras (and configs from one of the ASF project websites, treat all the content outside of the blog as placeholder pages or lorem-ipsum) which is a static-site generator used by a dozen other Apache TLP websites [0] such as Apisix, Pulsar etc. This PoC has all most of our blog migrated (except the most 4-6 new ones), but pending migration of website content; and is currently integrated with a Netlify CMS which isn't as rich as WP but allows a committer/PMC to login via Github and manage the website+blog using a rich-text markdown editor [1][2] where editing/saving content created git commits pushed to Github. I'm also looking at other headless git-based CMSs that we can use. We may revisit any design/theme changes in the future, if there are no objections as the first iteration I propose to migrate all our project website content along with the Roller blog to this PoC and ask interested contributors to review and collaborate in an on-going basis as we need to migrate the blog by 31st May '23. I hope to update again regularly. [0] https://github.com/search?q=org%3Aapache+docusaurus.config.js&type=code [1] https://beautiful-pastelito-4eb422.netlify.app/blog/ [2] https://beautiful-pastelito-4eb422.netlify.app/admin/ Thanks and regards. ________________________________ From: Rohit Yadav <rohit.ya...@shapeblue.com<mailto:rohit.ya...@shapeblue.com>> Sent: Wednesday, February 8, 2023 15:07 To: dev@cloudstack.apache.org<mailto:dev@cloudstack.apache.org> <dev@cloudstack.apache.org<mailto:dev@cloudstack.apache.org>> Cc: priv...@cloudstack.apache.org<mailto:priv...@cloudstack.apache.org> <priv...@cloudstack.apache.org<mailto:priv...@cloudstack.apache.org>> Subject: Re: [DISCUSS] CloudStack Website build and modernisation All, The ASF infra has advised recently that they're deprecating and removing Roller support, our project blog is based on Roller. Given this hasn't received any objections on this thread, I've spent some time in the last two months exploring options that solve most of our website and blog requirements. I explored several other top-level ASF project websites and found they had built their website/blog/article using something like Pelican, Hugo, Jekyll and recently Docusaurus. Among these Jekyll is the oldest and most stable platform that Github supports out of the box. Most of these TLP websites use a CI/CD based staging->publishing pipeline, using Github Actions, Gitpod, Netlify etc. Among these various options, Docusaurus seems to satisfy many of the requirements and integrates with Netlify CMS (to support our marketing contributors who aren't necessarily git-experts; https://www.netlifycms.org/docs/docusaurus/). If there aren't any objections I would like to set up a staging/beta website (as perhttps://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/INFRA/Git+-+.asf.yaml+features#Git.asf.yamlfeatures-WebsitedeploymentserviceforGitrepositories this can be configured, using default it would be on cloudstack.staged.apach.org<http://cloudstack.staged.apach.org/>). Example TLP website source repos: Docusaurus: https://github.com/apache/apisix-website https://github.com/apache/shenyu-website https://github.com/apache/incubator-kvrocks-website Jekyll: https://github.com/apache/openwhisk-website https://github.com/apache/nuttx-website Hugo: https://github.com/apache/kyuubi-website https://github.com/apache/hop-website https://github.com/apache/dubbo-website Regards. ________________________________ From: Rohit Yadav <rohit.ya...@shapeblue.com<mailto:rohit.ya...@shapeblue.com>> Sent: Monday, December 19, 2022 14:57 To: dev@cloudstack.apache.org<mailto:dev@cloudstack.apache.org> <dev@cloudstack.apache.org<mailto:dev@cloudstack.apache.org>> Subject: [DISCUSS] CloudStack Website build and modernisation All, For 4.17.2.0 release publication on the website, I had to manually edit the website [0] build as I couldn't get middleman to work on either Ubuntu 20.04, 22.04 (after spending a good hour to fix the ruby/gems build system). Any pointers on getting middleman/gems to work? As our website is dated, and in the past ASF infra has advised against setting up a dynamic CMS such as Wordpres for us I'm looking into alternatives that are ASF infra approved [1] and looking into Pelican and Jekyll. I'm also exploring what other ASF TLP websites are using for inspiration. I also found several apache projects such as apisix [2]<https://github.com/apache/apisix-website> having complex website build systems that use Netlify or other means of publishing websites. My high-level proposal is that we; (a) explore/investigate and migrate to a build system that is compliant with ASF infra policies and easy for anybody (esp PMCs and release managers) to setup/iterate locally, (b) integrate PR builds using Github actions or community CI/QA server (https://qa.cloudstack.cloud/) and, (c) we update the project website to use a modern library (something like Ant Design which we use with the ACS UI, or bootstrap, bulma, etc). Any suggestions, comments, or advice on this? [0] https://github.com/apache/cloudstack-www [1] https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/INFRA/Git+-+.asf.yaml+features#Git.asf.yamlfeatures-Staticwebsitecontentgeneration [2] https://github.com/apache/apisix-website Regards.
