It would be a while until the team gets to a position to be able to work on GetFedora and this arises an opportunity for the team to redirect their efforts into revamping/rebooting/refreshing other awesome sites and applications under the Fedora umbrella, in both functionality and appearance aspects. Here is a list of suggested projects (in no specific order) that the team can get started with almost immediately.
Keeping in mind the size of the team working on this and an emphasis on a polished rework, it had been decided unanimously in the Fedora W&A Meeting on 22nd June '21 that only one of the aforesaid projects would be actively worked on by the team at any point in time. As a glimpse of the existing code might help in deciding which project the team would want to take on first, I went ahead and listed the repositories where the aforesaid projects are maintained.
As much as it is important for the team to triage what they want to work on first based on the technical aspects and the feasibility/viability balance, it is just as important to know what preferences the community has regarding the websites - thus aiding the team to prioritize based on the usability and accessibility aspects. Please feel free to let the team know of your preference (and if possible, the reason behind it ).
Do note that this discussion topic would be kept open for suggestions and preferences until 29th June '21, which is when our next weekly W&A meet will take place as that is when the team would get started on working on the project suggested here. So which one is it going to be?
Noting that this effort of the team would be tightly bound with related teams such as Design and Infra, here are some tickets/PRs that could (possibly) be of help.
@t0xic0der thank you for putting everything together!
I agree with you, easyfix and start fpo do catch my interest.
For one particular reason, I am slightly inclined towards easyfix. A good easyfix page with clear layout could bring us more contributors.
I think ARM, Labs, Spins, and Alt Downloads actually fall under the overall website refresh, and unless you don’t mind making something that might get replaced again in six months (as a sort of practice/test project?), it’s probably better to just leave those be.
Start seems like a good, self-contained task, unlike some of these others
I don’t know what we’d want to do with Fedora Community. I think there’s some conceptual design work that needs to be done before it gets to practical design. That doesn’t mean this should be off the table, just that it’s a bigger project.
Same with Fedora People. On the one hand, it’s really just some storage space where you can dump stuff. On the other hand… maybe we want it to be something more? Or maybe it’s just “redesign the front page to be nicer”, which is also fine.
Fedora Easyfix is an interesting project with integration-into-where-these-things-come-from questions and work. It’d be nice for this to not just be prettier, but actually more useful as a starting point in general.
MirrorManager also has an administrative interface that isn’t readily apparent if you’re not signed up to maintain a mirror. All of this would probably need to be in coordination with the MirrorManager software itself, which again isn’t a blocker just a dependency.
@jaydoubleu, these are simply the websites for the projects. We would endeavour to modernize the way they look and the way they perform in the course of the next few weeks but it would be great to know which project the community would most suggest us to get started with.
If we want to have everything consistent in the Fedora Project and do this correctly I would suggest to wait until we have direction for main Fedora website revamp and then use agreed approach, UI, etc. for all connected websites. Of course each of listed above websites can and maybe should have something specific but in my opinion we should have consistent UX and UI across all Fedora websites and things like header, footer, navigation, colors and some general CSS styles should be unified.
For everyone outside the Project it will look professional and for us it will be just easier to maintain.
If there is other idea behind this initiative please let me know, maybe I just don’t have wider context.
One of the initial rewrites (or touch-ups, because we would not want to attempt fixing what is not broken) would be, in my perspective, just get our wheels rolling and help the team get started with a wider rewrite focus in the coming months. Being flexible to that extent to make changes if needed to go along with the GetFedora refresh is going to be beneficial in a lot of ways for the team as well as the larger community, as @misc discussed previously. I would not cover the same ground again as that would be mostly me paraphrasing what has been previously agreed upon by the team in the meetings - but we can assure you that the differences would be kept minimal across the board.
Hey, the poll is already closed, even though the title says “vote by the 29th”.
I think it’d be nice to work on the spins page, but the most important thing is bringing the download pages for main editions, spins, labs, alternate downloads into a single unified structure. I think the current approach of showing the primary editions first is sound, but all the other downloads should be available from the same place, maybe in a tab, or a subpage, or whatever. And it’s really important to be able to see all possible downloads in some form, so people can make a choice. We the people who are involved in the project can figure out when there’s some special download that we want and our myriad websites until we find it, but people from outside of the projects wouldn’t even know to start.
I believe the timezone reference for the poll was taken to be the one for the creator’s (i.e. apologetically, mine which is UTC+05:30) and the poll basically closed down when 29th June '21 started off in my timezone (which is one of the earliest timezones in the world, being in the east).
We would be carrying on with the discussion of the project of choice in today’s Fedora Websites and Apps meeting, so please feel free to join us at the #fedora-websites channel on Libera Chat and we’d be glad to extend an invite link to the meeting to you.
I concur with your suggestion of bringing the Spins f.p.o. to a unified structure with the GetFedora refresh, but that itself would take some time to materialize. I would go ahead and tag @pawelzelawski here as he would be able to share more information on the how it would be laid out.
Yeah, that confuses most people. “by ” generally is understood as “on at the latest”, i.e. until the end of that day. There was a huge discussion about freezes, and in the end the schedule says “Beta Freeze (starts at 1400 UTC)” to avoid people confusing people.
The point is moot, because I wanted to vote for the most popular option anyway
The pitfall here would be do some rework of the standalone spins page, only to throw the work away a few months down the road when the structure of the websites is redone.
I totally agree with this. We will likely save a lot of time and energy by focusing on shared UI elements as noted, and following that, have some back and forth discussion with the design team regarding how we will use cards and other elements to display different content types.
To increase mantainability in the future, this approach would make it much easier to also write documentation for a web dev style guide.
We have a mockup for the new start.fedoraproject.org - it needs a little bit of iteration based on the feedback but there’s been a pretty robust process up to thus far:
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