On Wednesday, 21 January 2015 at 15:35:59 UTC, Chris wrote:
> On Wednesday, 21 January 2015 at 14:46:22 UTC, Sebastiaan Koppe wrote:
>> Just for fun and proof-of-concept I went ahead and forked the dlang.org site. I basically took the `do-what-everybody-else-is-doing` approach:
>>
>> http://dlang.skoppe.eu
>>
>> It is still a wip, but the landing page and the language reference (see Docs menu-item) is working.
>>
>> Doing the ddoc was a maze of macro's at first. But spending a couple of hours untangling the mess, I finally found the ones I needed to change. After that things went pretty smooth. So ddoc ain't that bad. It is just that I didn't have syntax highlighting - nor goto-definition - and I hate that.
>>
>> Still, it is cool in a way that I can just change some macro's, tweak the index.dd, the doc.ddoc and don't have to worry about all the other pages.
>>
>> BTW, the build process on windows was way easier than linux. In fact, I could not get the makefile to run on linux at all. Looking into posix.mak, I see a blur of path's, all misconfigured, and I bet I am supposed to set those manually. I don't get it, doesn't everything has its own place? Isn't dmd always installed in /usr/bin, /usr/include/dmd and that stuff? I suppose not everyone is using the same distro. Or they are, except me :)
>
> Good start. A few points:
>
> 1. The font is too big (see also 2.).
> 2. A lot of space is wasted. To fix this, maybe it would help to lay it out in "tiles" (two or three items in one row, cf http://foundation.zurb.com/).
> As it is now, the three major points Convenience, Power and Efficiency are too far apart, there's too much scrolling involved (which users hate). All the important information should be visible at once.
> 3. No need to use so much space for "The D Programming Language", especially since we don't have a fancy graphic to fill that space (why should we).
> 4. Tools like DUB etc. should be bundled as on the Foundation homepage under something like "Build products, apps and services"

Good work in the right direction!.. and now for some bikeshedding:

Agreed with Chris on (1), (2), (3), plus:
(4) Not mobile-ready / not responsive. Try resizing horizontally and see what happens. This is related to (2) and could be solved by using a proper grid framework.
(5) Use a better sans serif font (with a fallback to browser default sans family), it actually matters a lot :) Like Fira Sans, Helvetica Neue or something like that. Could use a better monospaced font as well
(6) Hover-on/-off effects (like in the menu above) are usually frowned upon since they won't work on mobile devices as you expect. It's sometimes better to just have plain properly styled links.
(7) The search bar seems misplaced

On 1/21/15 6:46 AM, Sebastiaan Koppe wrote:
> Just for fun and proof-of-concept I went ahead and forked the dlang.org
> site. I basically took the `do-what-everybody-else-is-doing` approach:
>
> http://dlang.skoppe.eu
>
> It is still a wip, but the landing page and the language reference (see
> Docs menu-item) is working.

This is awesome, and something I'd get behind. Here's a little feedback coming from a self-admitted dilettante:

* On my laptop it looks like this: http://imgur.com/v8TC1xq. I'm seeing the red menu at the top, the gray sparse box, and also an odd fragment of the next page which has a different background, a title, and a fragment of code snippet. The way I look at it is either you go balls-out with the sparse gray page and make it occupy the entire viewport, or you make it smaller to allow me to get to some content. As things are I can't stop wondering: "Why did they waste all that space so I can't see stuff?"

* The red band at the top has the logo misaligned vertically.

* The font in the menus at the top are disproportionally small compared to the red band's thickness. Possibilities are to increase the fonts, reduce the band and the logo thickness, or make the logo go out of the bound in some stylish/asymmetric manner.

* The search box flushes left with the rest of the menu. Flush right instead?

* The design clarifies that some of the homepage content is awful, which is good :o)

* I don't care much about the dark gray bands alternating with the light gray snippets. Especially the "conference websites" one makes it painfully clear the padding top and bottom are too large. To be frank they were poorly styled in the original homepage.

* The bottom red strip is too thick, font is too large, and the top padding is larger than bottom padding. There's that awful old legal notice that's not on the homepage. How old is your content?

* Generally I feel I must scroll too much through too little (and occasionally crappy - not your fault) content on the homepage. There's just so much "air". But that might be part of the page's very look and feel, so if people like it no problem.

* Where's twitter?

* Page doesn't seem to load on mobile at all.

* Clicking on "Overview" while I'm on the homepage does nothing. But there's no visual indication I'm already on "Overview". Also clicking on "Overview" or the logo seem to do the same thing. Oh, wait, not all menus are meant to work - take that back.

* Clicking on "Docs" takes me to spec.html. That looks nice except the "Download" menu item is rendered in almost invisible white.

* There's no accordion on "Language Reference" which makes for a really tall menu, sometimes even longer than the content itself. I find that hard to navigate. Statistically nobody will get to "Visual D" and "Community" :o).

* "Preview new Layout" is too small.

* Top-level menu entries without submenus, of which there's only one ("Visual D") are rendered in an awkward black color that doesn't do much for me.

* The top and bottom spacing of submenus are not equal.

* The "Improve this page" and "page wiki" are not rendered properly.

* Layout is jerky as I reduce the width of the page: sometimes the right/left margins are really wide, even on thin viewports, thus wasting already precious space, then they get thin, then they get wide again, etc.

> Doing the ddoc was a maze of macro's at first. But spending a couple of
> hours untangling the mess, I finally found the ones I needed to change.
> After that things went pretty smooth. So ddoc ain't that bad. It is just
> that I didn't have syntax highlighting - nor goto-definition - and I
> hate that.

Yah, some editor support for ddoc would go a very long way.

> Still, it is cool in a way that I can just change some macro's, tweak
> the index.dd, the doc.ddoc and don't have to worry about all the other
> pages.

Love that.

> BTW, the build process on windows was way easier than linux. In fact, I
> could not get the makefile to run on linux at all. Looking into
> posix.mak, I see a blur of path's, all misconfigured, and I bet I am
> supposed to set those manually. I don't get it, doesn't everything has
> its own place? Isn't dmd always installed in /usr/bin, /usr/include/dmd
> and that stuff? I suppose not everyone is using the same distro. Or they
> are, except me :)

Glad to hear that. I don't use a Windows machine so it's good things work for you.

FWIW we build the actual website on Posix; I'm not sure how much win32.mak does, but posix.mak builds both the release and prerelease libraries using the right compilers etc. You should have no trouble building dlang.org on linux following the instructions at https://github.com/D-Programming-Language/dlang.org/blob/master/CONTRIBUTING.md.

The rationale for NOT using /usr/bin/dmd etc. is that oftentimes the docs use specific features of the compiler, which means you need to build a specific library docs with the same compiler version. For the site proper we always use the development version of dmd (which by default we assume is ../dmd/src/dmd) so people can change the compiler and the docs in tandem. Once you get that in place things should work smoothly.


Andrei

On Wednesday, 21 January 2015 at 15:08:02 UTC, Xinok wrote:
> On Wednesday, 21 January 2015 at 14:46:22 UTC, Sebastiaan Koppe wrote:
>> Just for fun and proof-of-concept I went ahead and forked the dlang.org site. I basically took the `do-what-everybody-else-is-doing` approach:
>>
>> http://dlang.skoppe.eu
>>
>
> This gets a big thumbs up from me. The layout is great, everything flows nicely, and a good blend of colors with the unofficial "D red".
>
> The only issue is that some elements aren't laid out correctly in Firefox.

Should be misplaced padding/margin somewhere.

On Wednesday, 21 January 2015 at 15:25:53 UTC, wobbles wrote:
> On Wednesday, 21 January 2015 at 14:46:22 UTC, Sebastiaan Koppe wrote:
>> Just for fun and proof-of-concept I went ahead and forked the dlang.org site. I basically took the `do-what-everybody-else-is-doing` approach:
>>
>> http://dlang.skoppe.eu
>>
>> It is still a wip, but the landing page and the language reference (see Docs menu-item) is working.
>>
>> Doing the ddoc was a maze of macro's at first. But spending a couple of hours untangling the mess, I finally found the ones I needed to change. After that things went pretty smooth. So ddoc ain't that bad. It is just that I didn't have syntax highlighting - nor goto-definition - and I hate that.
>>
>> Still, it is cool in a way that I can just change some macro's, tweak the index.dd, the doc.ddoc and don't have to worry about all the other pages.
>>
>> BTW, the build process on windows was way easier than linux. In fact, I could not get the makefile to run on linux at all. Looking into posix.mak, I see a blur of path's, all misconfigured, and I bet I am supposed to set those manually. I don't get it, doesn't everything has its own place? Isn't dmd always installed in /usr/bin, /usr/include/dmd and that stuff? I suppose not everyone is using the same distro. Or they are, except me :)
>
> I really like.
> How much work would be involved in keeping this look and feel over the rest of the site do you think?

Took me around 14 hours to get this far. Probably still 80% needs to be done.

"shut up and take my money" love it

On Wednesday, 21 January 2015 at 15:35:59 UTC, Chris wrote:
> On Wednesday, 21 January 2015 at 14:46:22 UTC, Sebastiaan Koppe wrote:
>> Just for fun and proof-of-concept I went ahead and forked the dlang.org site. I basically took the `do-what-everybody-else-is-doing` approach:
>>
>> http://dlang.skoppe.eu
>>
>> It is still a wip, but the landing page and the language reference (see Docs menu-item) is working.
>>
>> Doing the ddoc was a maze of macro's at first. But spending a couple of hours untangling the mess, I finally found the ones I needed to change. After that things went pretty smooth. So ddoc ain't that bad. It is just that I didn't have syntax highlighting - nor goto-definition - and I hate that.
>>
>> Still, it is cool in a way that I can just change some macro's, tweak the index.dd, the doc.ddoc and don't have to worry about all the other pages.
>>
>> BTW, the build process on windows was way easier than linux. In fact, I could not get the makefile to run on linux at all. Looking into posix.mak, I see a blur of path's, all misconfigured, and I bet I am supposed to set those manually. I don't get it, doesn't everything has its own place? Isn't dmd always installed in /usr/bin, /usr/include/dmd and that stuff? I suppose not everyone is using the same distro. Or they are, except me :)
>
> Good start. A few points:
>
> 1. The font is too big (see also 2.).
> 2. A lot of space is wasted. To fix this, maybe it would help to lay it out in "tiles" (two or three items in one row, cf http://foundation.zurb.com/).
> As it is now, the three major points Convenience, Power and Efficiency are too far apart, there's too much scrolling involved (which users hate). All the important information should be visible at once.
> 3. No need to use so much space for "The D Programming Language", especially since we don't have a fancy graphic to fill that space (why should we).
> 4. Tools like DUB etc. should be bundled as on the Foundation homepage under something like "Build products, apps and services"

Yeah, alot of stuff needs some fine-tuning. Specially the fonts.

Content is just copy-n-paste, could definitely use some marketing.

On Wednesday, 21 January 2015 at 16:15:21 UTC, eles wrote:
> On Wednesday, 21 January 2015 at 14:46:22 UTC,
>
> Impressive. Make the top menu larger on phone, pls. Otherwise, amazing.

The menu is not working indeed. It needs to default to a sliding menu on phones.

On Wednesday, 21 January 2015 at 16:22:08 UTC, aldanor wrote:
> On Wednesday, 21 January 2015 at 15:35:59 UTC, Chris wrote:
>> On Wednesday, 21 January 2015 at 14:46:22 UTC, Sebastiaan Koppe wrote:
>>> Just for fun and proof-of-concept I went ahead and forked the dlang.org site. I basically took the `do-what-everybody-else-is-doing` approach:
>>>
>>> http://dlang.skoppe.eu
>>>
>>> It is still a wip, but the landing page and the language reference (see Docs menu-item) is working.
>>>
>>> Doing the ddoc was a maze of macro's at first. But spending a couple of hours untangling the mess, I finally found the ones I needed to change. After that things went pretty smooth. So ddoc ain't that bad. It is just that I didn't have syntax highlighting - nor goto-definition - and I hate that.
>>>
>>> Still, it is cool in a way that I can just change some macro's, tweak the index.dd, the doc.ddoc and don't have to worry about all the other pages.
>>>
>>> BTW, the build process on windows was way easier than linux. In fact, I could not get the makefile to run on linux at all. Looking into posix.mak, I see a blur of path's, all misconfigured, and I bet I am supposed to set those manually. I don't get it, doesn't everything has its own place? Isn't dmd always installed in /usr/bin, /usr/include/dmd and that stuff? I suppose not everyone is using the same distro. Or they are, except me :)
>>
>> Good start. A few points:
>>
>> 1. The font is too big (see also 2.).
>> 2. A lot of space is wasted. To fix this, maybe it would help to lay it out in "tiles" (two or three items in one row, cf http://foundation.zurb.com/).
>> As it is now, the three major points Convenience, Power and Efficiency are too far apart, there's too much scrolling involved (which users hate). All the important information should be visible at once.
>> 3. No need to use so much space for "The D Programming Language", especially since we don't have a fancy graphic to fill that space (why should we).
>> 4. Tools like DUB etc. should be bundled as on the Foundation homepage under something like "Build products, apps and services"
>
> Good work in the right direction!.. and now for some bikeshedding:
>
> Agreed with Chris on (1), (2), (3), plus:
> (4) Not mobile-ready / not responsive. Try resizing horizontally and see what happens. This is related to (2) and could be solved by using a proper grid framework.
> (5) Use a better sans serif font (with a fallback to browser default sans family), it actually matters a lot :) Like Fira Sans, Helvetica Neue or something like that. Could use a better monospaced font as well
> (6) Hover-on/-off effects (like in the menu above) are usually frowned upon since they won't work on mobile devices as you expect. It's sometimes better to just have plain properly styled links.
> (7) The search bar seems misplaced

I am using a grid framework (purecss). And I resize all the time. What browser are you using?

Suggestions for the fonts are welcome. I just took the default and never looked back.

On 01/21/2015 07:00 AM, Ali Çehreli wrote:
> On 01/21/2015 06:46 AM, Sebastiaan Koppe wrote:
>
>  > Just for fun and proof-of-concept I went ahead and forked the dlang.org
>  > site. I basically took the `do-what-everybody-else-is-doing` approach:
>  >
>  > http://dlang.skoppe.eu
>
> I love it!

While you're at it, can you fix the following as well? :p

  http://ddili.org/ders/d.en/

Kidding... I will adopt whatever you are doing for dlang.org.

Ali

On 1/21/15 8:44 AM, Sebastiaan Koppe wrote:
> Yeah, alot of stuff needs some fine-tuning. Specially the fonts.

Better fonts would be awesome, these (and the existing ones) are just... bare.

> Content is just copy-n-paste, could definitely use some marketing.

No worries about content for now I'd say.


Andrei