Is this still happening? Is there a repo or a place I can go to help?

On Friday, 18 April 2014 at 14:04:04 UTC, Aleksandar Ruzicic wrote:
> Hello,
>
> I've been D enthusiast for couple of years now (but I do not participate much in discussions here, although I read forums almost daily), and I keep telling people about D and how awesome it is.
>
> But, all this time D's official website somehow archaic look kept troubling me. It reminds me of early 2000's design and I really cannot associate this design with "modern" or "elegant", what D really is.
> I think that we must invest time and energy improving the website's look and feel as that is what people first coming to D will see. We need to strive for "wow" and not "meh" as a first impression.
>
> So I have started this thread to see if there is a chance for complete redesign of dlang.org.
>
> I have also tried to design something myself (although I'm not a designer) and this is what I came up with:
>
> http://krcko.net/dlang.org/dlang-home-draft1.png
>
> I'm not entirely satisfied with it but I believe that it looks better (or at least more modern) than the current design.
>
>
> So, what do you guys think?
>
>
>
>
> -- Aleksandar

Any updates? Any help needed pushing this forward?

After watching Andrei's keynote where he was asking for help, and noticing that there wasn't any proof of someone working on this, I took charge.

http://w0rp.com:8010/

That's the design in the form of a single page website running on my Linode. The source is available here.

https://github.com/w0rp/new-dlang.org

I would like to keep going with this and just redesign the whole website. A few points worth noting.

* This is entirely a vibe.d website. (See the source.)
* For pages, DDoc is replaced with diet templates.
* I would still use ddox for generating library documentation.
* The page is mostly held together with Bootstrap, which is very good.
* The page is most of the way to being responsive (design sense), as it should be.
* The module in the middle is missing, I'd use some future version of Nowak's drepl and put a REPL right there on the front page.
* The logo is something I quickly put together with InkScape. Look at it as "please insert better logo here."

I encourage the use of diet over DDoc because it is simpler to insert dynamic content in the page, especially so for vibe.d. The support for doing conditional things or loops based on any dynamic content we can think of is right there in vibe.d.

Now unfortunately, I have two major complaints, for vibe.d and D itself.

For vibe.d, I can't think of a way to make changes to diet templates without recompiling the whole site. This doesn't seem so bad, given that compilation speed is very fast, but it builds up. This is because the process of experimenting with HTML becomes.

1. Make a change.
2. Recompile the whole program in a matter of seconds.
3. Refresh the browser window.

Those seconds in between making a change and seeing the results really build up over time. It's probably hard to describe without trying it yourself, but trust me, it matters. This is the kind of thing I have recently fought against at work, and it was well worth it. I replaced a Compass filesystem monitor with an even slightly broken libsass CPython compiler which compiled SCSS based on modification times. The couple seconds of difference has definitely improved the day-to-day life of myself and the web designer I work with.

This could be avoided if there was perhaps a way to rebuild diet templates at runtime. This could be enabled only for debug builds. So you could quickly make changes during development, and then compile everything statically for maximum speed for production.

The complaint I have for D is that too much memory is consumed for building D programs. The memory usage made it impossible for me to build the vibe.d site on my Linode, which the site above linked is running off of. The only way I was able to get the site to run on my Debian Wheezy server was to install a bunch of libraries from Debian testing, compile the program on my Arch Linux desktop, and then upload and run it on my server.

I'm not sure how to fix the issue myself, but something should be done to address this kind of issue. My Linode box has about 1GB of RAM with about 800MB free typically. Maybe I could have gotten things to build by increasing my swap space a little, I'm not sure.

So, what does everyone else think?

Firstly, wow, the site looks beautiful. It has an air of professionality to it, but stays minimal and to the point. I think it'd be best if there was a code example above the fold though (e.g. how basically every programming language website does it nowadays), such as the word length snippet on the index of dlang.org as of now.

Maybe it'd be good to have something about CTFE/more on templates in the "Convenience" or "Power" section, as that has gotten much more useful in the language the past year or two. Also, I assume a good amount of work has to be done porting the rest of the site over (the community and documentation sections don't seem to be implemented).

Again, fantastic job :) it's great to see people taking initiative. Hopefully dlang.org can get a facelift in the near future. I'd be happy to spend some time working on porting more of the site if it gets a "green light" from upper management to be a replacement.

On Saturday, 31 May 2014 at 20:01:50 UTC, Dylan Knutson wrote:
> Firstly, wow, the site looks beautiful. It has an air of professionality to it, but stays minimal and to the point. I think it'd be best if there was a code example above the fold though (e.g. how basically every programming language website does it nowadays), such as the word length snippet on the index of dlang.org as of now.

Yeah, that's why I was mentioning something about hosting drepl on the site. One of the first things you see should be D code you can run from your browser.

>
> Maybe it'd be good to have something about CTFE/more on templates in the "Convenience" or "Power" section, as that has gotten much more useful in the language the past year or two. Also, I assume a good amount of work has to be done porting the rest of the site over (the community and documentation sections don't seem to be implemented).

I just copied the text from the current website for now. I'm not a great copy writer myself. Someone else could surely do a better job of that.

>
> Again, fantastic job :) it's great to see people taking initiative. Hopefully dlang.org can get a facelift in the near future. I'd be happy to spend some time working on porting more of the site if it gets a "green light" from upper management to be a replacement.

Cool. I'll glady copy a bunch of pages into diet templates or whatever myself. I kind of need to do some of that anyway to make sure everything fits on the page as it should.

The flat design looks nice, but I really dislike the choice of background colour. It's bland and clashes quite badly with the white of the menu and content box.

On Saturday, 31 May 2014 at 20:12:06 UTC, Meta wrote:
> The flat design looks nice, but I really dislike the choice of background colour. It's bland and clashes quite badly with the white of the menu and content box.

For comparison, here's two images. One is the site with the background as the current gradient image, the second is the site with a background colour that matches your logo. Neither of them is particularly appealing, either, unfortunately.

On Saturday, 31 May 2014 at 20:38:05 UTC, Meta wrote:
> On Saturday, 31 May 2014 at 20:12:06 UTC, Meta wrote:
>> The flat design looks nice, but I really dislike the choice of background colour. It's bland and clashes quite badly with the white of the menu and content box.
>
> For comparison, here's two images. One is the site with the background as the current gradient image, the second is the site with a background colour that matches your logo. Neither of them is particularly appealing, either, unfortunately.

Whoops. http://imgur.com/oSHfFek,Mc81UYM

On Saturday, 31 May 2014 at 20:38:41 UTC, Meta wrote:
> On Saturday, 31 May 2014 at 20:38:05 UTC, Meta wrote:
>> On Saturday, 31 May 2014 at 20:12:06 UTC, Meta wrote:
>>> The flat design looks nice, but I really dislike the choice of background colour. It's bland and clashes quite badly with the white of the menu and content box.
>>
>> For comparison, here's two images. One is the site with the background as the current gradient image, the second is the site with a background colour that matches your logo. Neither of them is particularly appealing, either, unfortunately.
>
> Whoops. http://imgur.com/oSHfFek,Mc81UYM

Yes, a darker background does look quite nice.

On Saturday, 31 May 2014 at 19:49:22 UTC, w0rp wrote:
> After watching Andrei's keynote where he was asking for help, and noticing that there wasn't any proof of someone working on this, I took charge.
>
> http://w0rp.com:8010/
>
> That's the design in the form of a single page website running on my Linode. The source is available here.
>
> https://github.com/w0rp/new-dlang.org

I definitely like it. It scales fairly nicely, and works on high DPI screens very nicely thanks to the lack of non-svg images (excluding the Twitter bar which is somewhat lower quality because it uses low-res pngs for avatars). If the logo gets replaced, I'd like to see it remain SVG.

One thing that's a bit broken is that "Modern convenience. Modelling power. Native efficiency." wraps to put "efficiency." on a different line. Perhaps the text should be made smaller there. Another thing that I'd like to see is a much more prominent download button. It's definitely easier to find with this redesign, but a prominent download button is one of the most important things when you're trying to get someone to try something, right after a useful code sample (ideally with the mentioned REPL).