Pmbootstrap: More content on the pmOS homepage

[ollieparanoid]

Right now, I'm posting all "big news" about the project on my personal blog. This made sense in the beginning, when there was no community. But as it stands now, we have many contributors and the way we inform people about the progress should reflect that. So it would make more sense for me to put the next big announcement of the project's state (e.g. 100 days of pmOS or plasma on pmOS) on the official homepage.

I personally won't work on these changes right now, because I'd rather spend time on getting the binary repo working and other things, but this is where I'd like to take the home page before the next big announcement. Here are my ideas, please discuss!

• Use the "CMS" from my blog (as it was suggested here). Because I like having a minimal system, that works without installing a bazillion dependencies first. Please have a look at the source and judge for yourself if you think it is acceptable or not.
• Change the design of the blog, and integrate the current homepage's start page
• Write new, shorter introduction/security warning posts, that isn't written in the perspective of "I did...", but what we did together!

Note: I might write another post about the security architecture of the binary repo #64 on my own blog in the meantime, and keep writing on my blog about personal views of the project, such as how I would like to make this my day job one day.

[yuvadm]

I don't know if anyone else was thinking of taking care of the website, but if not I'll happily help out with the work on it. I've done lots of similar setups using static site generators: worked with Jekyll and Hugo recently, but I hate both of those projects as they indeed bring in lots of useless crap and dependencies.

The setup I'm using right now is based on Python + Flask + Frozen-Flask, and is pretty neat IMO. Since it's all plain python, integrating new stuff into it is super easy (e.g. I added markdown blog support in another project with 5 lines of code). @ollieparanoid your Makefile-based CMS looks awesome :) but I don't think it can scale well without a semi-useful templating engine for writing proper front-end templates.

As for the frond-end I also have started using http://tachyons.io/ which is a very clean and simple CSS toolkit. So I think I can hack something elegant pretty quickly,.

Anyway if there's a spec for what we need I'll happily start working on a proof-of-concept (while I'm stagnating on getting the flame to work 😉 )

[MartijnBraam]

I think the makefile generator can work very good if you add dependency on pandoc and some other text utilities

[kskarthik]

Jekyll being the most popular one out there, New contributors will find it easy to engage.

[yuvadm]

Thanks for the comments guys, I know some of you prefer other methods, but I think the best way to propose a solution is to provide a proof of concept. I've went ahead and implemented a very basic skeleton for an updated website:

• Code: https://github.com/yuvadm/pmosweb/
• Preview: https://yuvadm.github.io/pmosweb/

Features

• A very simple Python/Flask-based structure that supports both live local development as well as static content generation
• Keeps external dependencies low while providing a good basis for easy development
• Jinja2-based HTML templates
• Lightweight Tachyons CSS toolkit provides a clean and solid look-and-feel, 100% responsive so looks great on mobile too
• Markdown-based blog posts (did the intro post as a sample)
• Built-in wiki content integration via git submodules (this can be cool for integrating specific pages, we probably don't want them all)

All content is loosely based on what we have right now with a bit of cleanup. Obviously both the content and the design are up for discussion.

I'd love to know what you think. Personally I'll be happy to continue putting more work into developing and expanding the website, and would love to do that with your support and feedback 😄

[ollieparanoid]

I am not used to writing websites in Python, so to me this still looks like a load of dependencies (what is that for?) to be honest. But I would trade that in for maintainability, which is a lot better here than with that hand-crafted Makefile, so I'm cool with it!

About the wiki pages: That is a cool feature! But it also seems like it would create a bit more maintenance effort to keep it in sync. So in order to keep it as simple as possible, I suggest just using the wiki as we do now and link to the wiki from the homepage, whenever it makes sense.

Features I would like to see:

• shorturls we have defined should still work, and it should be possible to add new ones (current code, maybe you could simplify this to a simple name: wiki URL config file?)
• estimated reading time for each article/blog post
• a FAQ page or something (pages are possible?)

Design remarks:

• The links in the navigation are not recognizable as links, they could use some formatting
• Generally the page looks a bit plain. I am not a designer and I can't tell you whether this would look good or not to me, until I see it. But maybe we could add a pile of devices in the background or something?
• Could we use the fat phone with the recycle icon from the disroot chat as favicon? (and maybe generally as logo, instead of just the recycle icon, which is a bit generic?)
• I personally do not like the default color for visited links

Remember, I am speaking for myself here, not for the entire community. Thank you very much for all the effort you put into this! I especially like the documentation in the README.md, which lists all important information.

[MartijnBraam]

Hmm I will try to create a less-empty homepage (will make PR on @yuvadm's code)

[yuvadm]

@ollieparanoid The effort really is a labor of love for me. I think this entire project is great and I'm happy I have the chance to work on all aspects of it. And thanks for the quick feedback, didn't take too long :)

I should have mentioned this is more of a POC for the foundation of the website and I definitely want to put more time into making it look good, so I share all of your feedback on the design and aesthetics of the site.

As for the wiki pages I agree this is a duplication of content and I don't want to do that at all, I just wanted to show that we can use the wiki as a poor man's content editor for very specific pages we might want to mirror to the website (e.g. I think supported device list based on the wiki is a good candidate). Of course we don't have to do, but just putting it out there as an option.

Backwards compatibility is also a must, and I'll make sure to add the relevant shortlinks.

Pages definitely are possible, the homepage is such an example, you just write the HTML and render the template. Markdown is only for the blogs.

I see @MartijnBraam wants to join in on the fun, so that's great! To make things easier, if we feel comfortable with the general direction, I propose the following:

• [x] Move the POC over from my repo to a new branch in the official repo
• [x] Provide me and other contributors with write access to the repo
• [ ] Continue iterating on the design and structure feedback
• [ ] Import all existing blog posts and reflect the community work done
• [ ] When we want to launch: replace master branch with the new branch and save the old one for posterity as a separate branch

[ollieparanoid]

That plan sounds good to me, I have imported your code in the next branch, and gave you and @MartijnBraam write access to the repository. Whoever wants to contribute to the website, please speak up so you can also be given write access (@kskarthik for example, because you made the initial design which was excellent for its minimalistic purpose!).

If someone thinks, that we have rushed this and should have a more fundamental discussion now, please also speak up 👍

[yuvadm]

@ollieparanoid Awesome, thanks! As for existing blog content, any idea which posts you'd like to migrate over from your personal blog to the pmOS blog, besides the intro one? I'll happily do the initial conversion, but since you're the original author you should have a final say on how you want to phrase the posts :)

[yuvadm]

Also, I noticed the website repo has issues disabled. Is that by design? I have no preference either way, but maybe it might be cleaner to manage all website issues in the website repo?

[ollieparanoid]

any idea which posts you'd like to migrate over from your personal blog to the pmOS blog, besides the intro one?

I would also add some version of the "security warning" post. There's a lot to improve, e.g. the title - a parody of the intro post - was not received as well as I thought and the whole post in general didn't get much positive feedback, when compared to the amount of upvotes/comments the other posts had. But nevertheless, the information this post has about outdated proprietary firmware being security holes we can't fix right now is very important.

Also, I noticed the website repo has issues disabled. Is that by design? I have no preference either way, but maybe it might be cleaner to manage all website issues in the website repo?

Good point! That was not intentional, and I've just enabled the issues.

[yuvadm]

@ollieparanoid great, then I propose we start to discuss website issues over there to keep the discussion focused. We can also start breaking it down into smaller issues.