Re: Work on a newer website, comments welcome

On 16/08/2012, Mihamina Rakotomandimby <[email protected]> wrote:
> On 08/15/2012 07:35 PM, Adrien wrote:
>> Also, the website code is maybe less than HTML 4 and with an old design.
>> it's pretty simple and I personaly enjoy that but comments on that
>> aspect are welcome too.
>
> It's just about me:
> - the design should be a bit more "modern" (I could help if we find the
> good template). No matter if we choose one of those freely available on
> the Internet

Agreed.

A big issue with the page is that it's linear and it wastes a
lot of horizontal space. This means that it doesn't fit into one screen
even though it could. For instance, having two columns of text would
make it much more compact and readable since it would avoid the need to
scroll.

> - we should use something more dynamic: I mean the tutorials are damn
> static, with no way to comment or collaborate. At least we should use a
> git/darcs/hg based static website, so that people could suggest. My
> preference would be to talk to the Ocsigen guys if in a way Ocsimore
> would be usable.

I agree that we could try something more dynamic and collaborative.
However I don't think the currently-existing tutorial are a good place
for that: they've been around for a long time and while we could bring
some improvements right now, after these, I doubt there would be much to
change and we would still have the data stored into a database, with a
php/whatever wiki program to run along with the corresponding spam
issues and so on.

By the way, avoid VCS-based wikis or other dynamic websites. All the
people I've seen try that have given up because it was too complex and
none of them were beginners.

There is something else to consider too: lablgtk is hosted on the OCaml
forge and this brings some limitations (along with many more
possibilities than the previous platform). I've just checked in another
project and I've enabled the "Mediawiki" plugin:
  https://forge.ocamlcore.org/plugins/mediawiki/wiki/caravel/index.php/Main_Page
The default CSS seems to have an issue but the plugin works.

-- 
Adrien Nader