[cairo] cairographics.org website

[Bryce Harrington]

On Fri, Dec 11, 2020 at 05:30:02PM +0800, Mohit Sindhwani wrote:
> Hi Bryce,
> 
> 
> On 2020-12-11 3:04 pm, Bryce Harrington wrote:
> > Cairo has an ok website but it's gotten quite antiquated.  Originally it
> > was maintained as a git-based wiki, however the wiki was turned off (I
> > think; before my time) for security reasons.  And more recently, with
> > the migration of freedesktop to new hosting, the automatic git updates
> > stopped working.  For the 1.17.4 release I had to do some manual
> > fiddling on the server.  Whomever replaces me will find the whole setup
> > funkily flimsy.
> > 
> > Before I go, I'd like to throw this idea out there:
> 
> I have not used Gitlab but I know Github has Github pages that use a
> combination of Jekyll + Markdown to publish directly from a repository. It's
> a static site generator and I'm sure that GitLab has something similar.
> 
> I'd like you to consider 2 questions while we wait for others to respond:
> 1. Do you expect that updates are done only by a couple of people or would
> it be a more wiki style system where anyone can update it? Generally, I do
> feel that wiki style pages work well for technical content while static
> website style pages work well for websites (CMS style)
> 2. I used to use the Radiant CMS for a long time but it is not actively
> developed on a modern Ruby (and Rails) any more. So, I can see it can be
> done in any platform of this kind.

I've played with gitlab + markdown for simple static website management
in other projects, and something of that ilk would probably be what I'd
look at if it was me.  It might be beneficial to look at what other
Freedesktop-based projects are doing for their websites and copy
something with a low footprint.

Personally I think wiki(*) and cms are far overkill for what Cairo needs.
Thinking back over the past 7 years there were only a handful of times
when content changes were needed, and iirc I did all the changes
myself.  So I think keeping the technology super simple is going to have
the most value.

> Briefly, it doesn't look like a lot of pages (~50 or so), so it might not be
> difficult to move to some alternative.

Agreed.  And a large chunk of that is tutorial/example content that
could just go, or be done differently.

The news items for the release announcements have been the primary
source of new content for the site.  Keeping that workflow
time-efficient for the release maintainer is probably important.

Note that stable releases also deploy updates for the Cairo manual.
That is kept separately from the website proper but if someone redesigns
it, the manual may also need similar treatment.

> I personally also feel that the biggest issue is the design :)

Which is a bit ironic given Cairo's purpose.  ;-)

> I will take a look later to form an opinion also.
> 
> Best Regards,
> Mohit.

Bryce