New Website !

From: Vinnie Falco (vinnie.falco_at_[hidden])
Date: 2023-05-11 14:26:44

Hey, it’s Vinnie here again! I have some very exciting news to share
with you. The renovated website for Boost that we’ve been working on
for far too long is now going into its Public Beta phase! Feel free to
poke around and kick the tires but keep in mind this is a piece of
software and it is still under development. Some parts are missing,
incomplete,or buggy. Without further ado:

https://boost.revsys.dev

This public beta will extend for at least 10 weeks as we finish the
last remaining features, and put a few more rounds of polish on the
artwork, visual styling, and user interface. After that if you like
what you see then we will reset the database, move the repositories
and the site to their new homes, and then deploy it for real! If you
have suggestions or wish to report problems please feel welcome to
open an issue here:

https://github.com/cppalliance/temp-site/issues

This is a Django site written and maintained in Python by a great
group of folks from https://www.revsys.com/. The project is
coordinated by Frank Wiles
(https://www.revsys.com/about/bio/frankwiles), who shares the same
deep commitment to open source that we Boost people do. We chose
Django because it is well understood and supported, and because Python
composes well with ease of maintenance. This technology stack allows
us to execute on our future plans with confidence.

Some cool things about this website include:

* Log in with GitHub or Google
* Light and Dark themes with selector
* Asciidoc markdown for dynamic content
* Antora content sources for site documentation
* Data-driven dynamic pages for libraries and releases
* Integrated control panel for producing Boost releases
* Full-text search across the documentation and library headers
* Professionally designed logo to evoke identity and instant recognition

The layout of the site is carefully thought out to make sure that
information can be found quickly. Fundamental topics each get a
dedicated word in the top level navigation, visible on every page
including the site and library documentation. Most of the information
which is not library-specific is warehoused in “site docs” which is a
collection of individual Antora content sources each authored in
Asciidoc. Anyone can update the information on the website simply by
contributing to the site-docs via pull request:

https://github.com/cppalliance/site-docs

Antora and Asciidoc are potent technologies that offer Boost plenty of
room to grow to make our site documentation and library documentation
more effective for users. While the initial release of the website
after the beta will only have the basic functionality, we have many
future plans. Some of these you have heard about already and some are
new:

* A web-based forum which interacts seamlessly with the mailing list
* Polls and surveys for measuring the sentiment of Boost users and stakeholders
* News section for aggregating off-site links, blog posts, and release
progress messages
* Integrated Review process. Outcomes go in the database and become
dynamic content.
* User Profiles record and show activity such as review participation
or library submission

We’re all very excited and proud of the work that went into this thing
and hope that it really fulfills the positive impact that we intended.

Thanks!

Vinnie