Re: Report of the Debian Web Team Sprint (15-17 March 2019)

Thanks Laura!

I participated in a bof "Debian Website BoF" during DebConf18, this
opportunity I also made some comments on the KallesDesign. I imagine
we have notes on the Gobby.
I think other than a contest/competition to choose the "best design
proposals", we can make a call to people to send improvements to
KallesDesign[1], continuing the work that has been done, a standard
design and architecture for all subsites of the Debian project.

Count on my collaboration! I suggest that we do some work during the
next DebCamp.

[1] https://wiki.debian.org/KallesDesign

Cheers,
Valessio Brito
www.valessiobrito.com.br

Em seg, 15 de abr de 2019 às 21:38, Laura Arjona Reina
<[email protected]> escreveu:
>
> Dear all
>
> Below you can find the report of the sprint that some members of the
> Debian web team had last March.
> The Summary part will be posted as article in bits.debian.org soon, with
> photo :-)
>
> Thanks Rhonda, Steve, Thomas and Carsten for coming, thanks to everybody
> who made it possible, and to all the teammates that before and after the
> sprint are helping with the improvement of the Debian website. Hopefully
> we'll meet again in the future!
>
> Kind regards,
>
> --
> Laura Arjona Reina
> https://wiki.debian.org/LauraArjona
>
>
> # Report of the Debian Web Team Sprint
>
> ## Summary
>
> The [Debian Web team](https://wiki.debian.org/Teams/Webmaster) held a
> [sprint](https://wiki.debian.org/Sprints/2019/DebianWebTeam) for the
> first time, in Madrid (Spain) from March 15th to March 17th, 2019.
>
> We discussed the status of the Debian website in general, review several
> important pages/sections and agreed on many things how to improve them.
>
> For the sections we want to reorganise (mainly the homepage and a new
> section "download" which will group our current "CD" and "distrib"
> sections) , we have designed this workflow:
> * Create branches in the webwml repo,
> * Agreed on the new or modified content (started already during the
> sprint), and work on them further after the sprint
> * Review a lot of related open bugs to see if we can address them with
> the new content (done during the sprint)
> * Create bug reports for the things that cannot be solved quickly to
> keep them tracked (started during the sprint)
> * We agreed we should get further help from web designers/information
> architects (pending)
> * Once the English version is more or less settled, call for
> translations on the branch (pending)
> * If we have English and the main translations ready, merging into the
> master branch (pending)
> * We will try to have at least the homepage and the download section
> ready for the Buster release.
>
> We also agreed that the press delegates should decide what new News
> entry is worth to be posted in the homepage instead of showing the last
> 6 entries.
>
> For some other pages or areas (e.g. doc/books, misc/merchandise, /users)
> we found that the content is outdated and the team can not maintain it,
> we agreed in issuing a call for help (request for adoption) and if we
> cannot find volunteers for those pages/areas, we'll remove the content
> or move it to wiki.debian.org at the end of 2019.
>
> We have agreed that we'll need to reduce the size (number of pages) of
> the website (*see some numbers about statistics at bottom) so it's more
> sustainable to keep the whole website up-to-date (content wise), so
> we'll remove some pages having content already covered in other pages,
> having content that currently is easy discoverable with a web search
> engine, can be maintained better in the wiki, etc.
>
> We have talked a bit about certain other aspects  like point release
> workflow, the build time of the website, team memberships and
> governance. In general the sprint has shown that for most of the
> discussed topics the migration to git as VCS and the existence of Salsa
> is a huge step forward for the usability and attractiveness for
> contributors of the webwml repository.
>
> The core webteam is happy that the sprint has also attracted new people
> to jump in and which are also members of the webteam now. We welcome
> Thomas Lange and Carsten Schoenert in our team!
>
> Finally, we have passed time together to socialize and knowing each
> other better, and got very motivated to continue working on the web.
>
> The participants would like to thank all donors to the Debian project
> who helped to cover a large part of our expenses.
>
> ## Details
>
> ### Debian website homepage (www.debian.org/index)
>
> Thomas Lange had made a proposal of a new homepage in DebConf18, and we
> came back to it and agreed on how to deploy it.
> We have two main goals in mind: To simplify the starting homepage so
> it's more attractive to newcomers, and to show the social aspect of the
> project as well as the operating system that we develop.
>
> A review of the whole website is also needed at some time, but we agreed
> on starting with the homepage and the pages that will be accessed from
> it. So the basic proposal is:
>
> Homepage:
>
>     Debian is about People
>
>     People
>
>     Philosophy
>
>     Get involved
>
>     More (here you can access all the pages that are present currently
> in the website and not linked above)
>
>     Debian is an OS
>
>     Download
>
>     Security
>
>     Support
>
>     More (here you can access all the pages that are present currently
> in the website and not linked above)
>
>
> All this is being done in the [branch new-homepage of the webwml
> repo](https://salsa.debian.org/webmaster-team/webwml/tree/new-homepage).
>
> You can see the most recent WIP homepage in
> https://debian-newhomepage.larjona.net
>
> Related bugs:
>     #696873  [n|  |  ]  [www.debian.org]  Better place for "download
> debian" button
>     #815689  [n|  |  ]  [www.debian.org]  www.debian.org: Show recent
> project news (not only announcements + security updates) on the homepage
>     #862980  [n|⎈|  ]  [www.debian.org]  Update the homepage, to show
> the social face of the project, and be more attractive for newcomers
>     #188617  [w|  |  ]  [www.debian.org]  www.debian.org: [front page]
> would like link to intro/organization from left-side navbar
>     #905352  [w|  |  ]  [www.debian.org]  add section "Why Debian" to
> the home page
>     #924942  [w|  |  ]  [www.debian.org]  www.debian.org: Suggestion; on
> the new people page, add a welcome message and a photo of the current DPL
>
> We also agreed that the press delegates will decide what new News entry
> is worth to be posted in the homepage
> instead of showing the last 6 entries.
>
> ### CD/Distrib sections
>
> We have several long standing bugs about the CD and distrib sections,
> these sections should be merged together and also they need to be
> simplified and with specific step by step instructions.
>
> We don't want that the download button in the homepage downloads a
> specific ISO any more, instead we'd like it to take the user to a simple
> page explaining how to choose their preferred image, download it,
> verify it and install (see below in this report for details).
>
> We created an initial new structure of the new "Download" page, agreed
> on its content, and created a [branch
> new-cd_distrib-section](https://salsa.debian.org/webmaster-team/webwml/tree/new-cd_distrib-section)
> to work on it.
>
> You can see the WIP download page in
> https://debian-newdownload.larjona.net/download
>
> Related bugs:
>     #819664 Re-organise the CD / download pages to make them more useful
>     #695681 document available cloud options under www.debian.org/distrib/
>     #720989  [n|  |  ]  [www.debian.org]  www.debian.org: unexperienced
> users fail to download installation media especially for usb drives
>     #851541  [n|  |  ]  [www.debian.org]  www.debian.org: CD/verify
> should include long key IDs
>     #902668  [n|  |  ]  [www.debian.org]  Draft for rewrite of
> https://www.debian.org/CD/verify
>     #381555  [w|  |  ]  [www.debian.org]
> http://www.debian.org/CD/netinst/ : add link to iso md5 checksum
>     #612116  [w|  |  ]  [www.debian.org]  www.debian.org: /CD/ should
> now redirect to the new /distrib/
>     #640054  [w|  |  ]  [www.debian.org]  Download pages should have
> prominent links to image verification instructions
>     #705209  [w|  |  ]  [www.debian.org]  www.debian.org: Ask for a
> donation while people are downloading Debian
>     #709004  [w|+|  ]  [www.debian.org]  www.debian.org: Please mention
> win32-loader on "Getting Debian" webpage
>     #722906  [w|  |=]  [www.debian.org]  Document additional methods for
> validating Debian-distributed files
>     #797342  [w|  |  ]  [www.debian.org]  www.debian.org: simple and
> easy to use download page
>     #925300  [n|  |  ]  [www.debian.org]  Debian home page: Cleaning up
> the "Getting Started" paragraph
>
> ## Review of other sections
>
> Some info that is shown in our homepage had made sense many years ago
> but now it's irrelevant because anybody can find the same info or even
> more updated using a simple web search.
>
> So we have agreed on removing these:
>
> * /events/speakers
> * /misc/related_links
> * /ports/beowulf pages (and review/remove other mentions)
> * obsolete pages about CVS, and links to them
>
> We have issued "RFA (Request for Adoption)" mails (call for help) in
> these pages/sections
> * /doc/books
> * /misc/merchandise
> * /users
> And gladly several persons already jumped in and offered to volunteer on
> maintaining those :-)
>
> ### Other work
>
> Simplified the built-time code massively and make it correct by stop
> trying to use the GEN_TIME stuff, and just use gmtime() directly in
> english/template/debian/ctime.wml
>
> We'd like to change the footer with list of languages because sometimes
> is too long, so we're working in a list of languages able to be
> shown/hidden with CSS styling.
> Rhonda has done some work.
> Related Bug:
>     #924889  [n|  |  ]  [www.debian.org]  Use a drop down selector
> (without JS) to switch the language of the website
>
> ### Review of bug list
>
> We have reviewed the bug list and during the sprint or soon after it we
> have closed these bugs:
>
>     #614233 [n|  |  ] [www.debian.org] www.debian.org: Debian = "Debian
> GNU/Linux" + "Debian GNU/kFreeBSD"
>     #924888 [n|  |  ] [www.debian.org] try to remove the /misc section
> (reviewing and reorganising content)
>     #251218 [w|  |  ] [www.debian.org] /devel/people gives recognition
> for quantity of packages, not quality
>     #320426 [w|  |  ] [www.debian.org] www.debian.org: Releases page
> doesn't advise mailing list sub
>     #439671 [w|☹|  ] [www.debian.org] doc-debian: bug in social
> contract, section 4?
>     #515814 [w|  |  ] [www.debian.org] www.debian.org: Please provide
> source for pdf-graphics in devel/debian-med/News/2009/20090214.wml
>     #845297 [n|  |  ] [www.debian.org] [www.debian.org] Website
> transition from CVS to Git
>     #924135 [n|  |  ] [www.debian.org] clean-up: old .cvsignore files
>     #197392 [m|  |  ] [www.debian.org] several www.debian.org URLs
> contain capital letters
>     #98811 [w|  |  ] [www.debian.org] Future or updated pages should use
> XHTML 1 if possible
>     #832920 [n|  |  ] [www.debian.org] redirect HTTP to HTTPS on
> www.debian.org
>     #924120 [n|  |  ] [www.debian.org] Say "netinst multi-arch CD images"
>     #924164 [n|  |  ] [www.debian.org] Don't say use Jigdo
>
> ### Governance and workflows
> We have noticed that the group of people behind [email protected],
> the group of people in the debwww group and the group of people "owner"
> in the Salsa repos are not the same. We'll try to communicate with
> everybody involved and review each of those permission groups.
>
> ### Statistics:
> 52000 wml files over all!
>
>     891 consultants
>    1046 vote
>    1170 releases
>    1801 devel
>    2024 users
>    2656 events   (only events until 2013)
>    7809 News
>   31631 security
>
>
> --
> Laura Arjona Reina
> https://wiki.debian.org/LauraArjona
>