Re: [boost] [website] Suggestions

Subject: Re: [boost] [website] Suggestions
From: Daniel James (dnljms_at_[hidden])
Date: 2011-05-02 17:49:28

On 2 May 2011 19:34, Dave Abrahams <dave_at_[hidden]> wrote:
> +1 to all this.  Stephan, you should open a ticket for the website
> component on http://svn.boost.org/trac/boost

I've spent more time than I'd wish to on the site recently, so I'm not
doing much for a while. I was actually going to rework the menus and
some other things a while ago, but that was abandoned when the
wordpress site was announced and I haven't picked it up again.

If anyone's interested, instructions for updating the site are at:

http://www.boost.org/development/website_updating.html

> On Thu, Apr 28, 2011 at 9:53 PM, Stephan T. Lavavej
> <stl_at_[hidden]> wrote:
>> It would be wonderful if:
>>
>> 1. On the main page, there was a direct link to the current version's documentation.  Currently, you have to click Documentation, then "1.46.1 - Current Release".
>>
>> (Actually, I just noticed that a direct link does exist - Libraries under Welcome.  I was hoping for a big blue button saying GET DOCS.)

If anyone wants to do this, details are in the 'Menus, Sidebars, and
Index' part of the website updating page. If you want to update the
home page, the template is at 'site-tools/templates/index-src.html',
you can run 'site-tools/site-tools.py update' to regenerate the home
page (it'll complain that it can't run quickbook and that it's missing
a feed entry, but you can ignore that).

>> 2. There was a terse list of links to each library's documentation.  The master list currently mentions 6 additional pieces of information for each library (Summary, Authors, First Release, Standard, Build, and Categories).  That's nice, but it makes finding library X's documentation significantly more tedious than it has to be (I count 105 libraries in 1.46.1 - that's a lot of scrolling!).  I suspect that even beginners don't need information other than the Summary 99% of the time.  The current info should be preserved somewhere, but clicking on a release's documentation should bring up a terse list first.
>>
>> http://cid-e66e02dc83efb165.office.live.com/self.aspx/docs/boost.html is a horribly ugly preview of what I'm suggesting (because some libraries have long summaries, I've arbitrarily truncated them; ideally, each library would have a single-line summary at reasonable browser widths).

If anyone wants to do this, much of what you need is already
implemented for the categorized list of libraries:

http://www.boost.org/doc/libs/?view=categorized

The php that generates that page is at:

https://svn.boost.org/svn/boost/website/public_html/beta/doc/libraries.php

It's pretty convoluted, but you can just look at how the categorized
view is implemented, using the foreach loop from the normal view to
get the flat list of libraries.

>> 3. http://boost.org didn't redirect to http://www.boost.org .  Even better, if the reverse happened ("Class B", according to http://no-www.org/faq.php ).  Clearly, this is the most important issue of all.  :->

It's generally considered a good idea to redirect to a single domain
so that pages have a canonical location. The 'www' is useful as it
distinguishes the site from the other subdomains for things like
cookies. It's also how the site has been historically referred to.