Revamp of prometheus.io website sponsored by Pixel Point

[Julius Volz]

Hi Prometheans,

I just came off a chat and call with Alex (CC-ed) from Pixel Point (https://pixelpoint.io/). They are a web design agency that likes to contribute back to OSS projects that they love and use, so Alex offered us a redesign of the https://prometheus.io/ website for free (complete revamp of the landing page and minor restyling of the docs pages).

Some websites that Pixel Point has already helped with are:

- Drone: https://drone.io/

- K6: https://k6.io/

Obviously this is a larger undertaking that needs general agreement from the team, but given the quality of the design I think it's a no-brainer provided that we can maintain the result and are willing to take some time to work with Alex + team to make sure we get what we want.

On the maintenance aspect, Pixel Point usually uses Gatsby (https://www.gatsbyjs.com/), which I think is great, flexible, and well-known (I use it for promlabs.com too). I already brought up that we would need to verify the site compilation speed in the face of many markdown pages, basically what we ran into with our current nanoc site before Julien optimized it. Alex understands that this would be the first step before deciding on Gatsby as the underlying technology. Other than that, I don't see major issues to watch out for, does anyone else?

I will let Alex reply and introduce himself, but initially it would be good to get a general feel of the team and whether everyone agrees that this would be a good idea. If we agree, then I think it would make most sense for one or two people (volunteering myself) to be the contact for this effort so Pixel Point can iterate without too much trouble and decision blockers.

Cheers,

Julius

[Julien Pivotto]

Hello Julius,

I am 1000% for this, but it gatsby a replacement for nanoc?

--
Julien Pivotto
@roidelapluie

[Julius Volz]

On Wed, Oct 14, 2020 at 6:20 PM Julien Pivotto <roidel...@prometheus.io> wrote:

I am 1000% for this, but it gatsby a replacement for nanoc?

Yes. It's a JS/TS-based static site builder that would completely replace nanoc if we determine that the compilation speed is ok.

[Tobias Schmidt]

It'd be rad to see a complete site overhaul! The UI could definitely see a lot of improvements, so does our documentation structure actually.

Though, I'm not so keen on adopting a JS site builder for Prometheus. Compilation speed has already been brought up, but the more important factor is that the prometheus is predominantly  a Go project with Go experience being by far the highest. I have helped a friend with a larger JS project in the last months and the average number of JS dependencies and churn in the ecosystem make me very sceptical about us having the capacity to maintain it properly. In my humble opinion we'd fare better using Hugo as site generator.

Funny enough, just last night I started working on the long-standing request to automate the repository docs compilation, so that the site updates on new prometheus/alertmanager releases automatically. I have it almost ready - but oh boy is our navigation code a nightmare. I have the feeling the main issue for our compilation speed is the menu generation and quite a few nested loops which get executed every time.

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[Julius Volz]

On Wed, Oct 14, 2020 at 6:54 PM Tobias Schmidt <tob...@gmail.com> wrote:

It'd be rad to see a complete site overhaul! The UI could definitely see a lot of improvements, so does our documentation structure actually.

Though, I'm not so keen on adopting a JS site builder for Prometheus. Compilation speed has already been brought up, but the more important factor is that the prometheus is predominantly  a Go project with Go experience being by far the highest. I have helped a friend with a larger JS project in the last months and the average number of JS dependencies and churn in the ecosystem make me very sceptical about us having the capacity to maintain it properly. In my humble opinion we'd fare better using Hugo as site generator.

I'd offer some counter points: Working with Typescript and React / JSX / TSX / CSS Modules (all of which you get with Gatsby) is sooo productive in comparison to doing Go-based HTML templating. You get a thoroughly typed representation of your site across code, styling, and content, with amazing tooling right in your editor. Frederic seems to have recently discovered this himself :) https://twitter.com/fredbrancz/status/1314219293224169474

I'm not too worried about dependencies, as they might be many, but they have never really gotten in my way, install really fast, and the big ecosystem has packages to do pretty much anything you might want.

 

Funny enough, just last night I started working on the long-standing request to automate the repository docs compilation, so that the site updates on new prometheus/alertmanager releases automatically. I have it almost ready - but oh boy is our navigation code a nightmare. I have the feeling the main issue for our compilation speed is the menu generation and quite a few nested loops which get executed every time. 

Great!

The menu generation is exactly what Julien optimized through caching last time: https://github.com/prometheus/docs/pull/1662

It did make the code more complicated than it already was, but the speedup was big. Hopefully this will actually work better with Gatsby :)

[Alex Barashkov]

Hi Prometheans,

Thank you for the great introduction Julius! Our team is looking forward to working with you guys and creating new stunning UI. We have some vision of how could it look like. If you are up for the idea of redesigning the website, we will need to start from the content at first. What information do we need to put on the homepage, what’s missing in the current version? I have my thoughts on it however it would be good to hear your ideas.

Choosing the technology is not super important at this moment, because it will take 1-1.5 before we complete the design, so we have time to discuss and test everything.

We also will handle the whole implementation of the new website, to make sure it looks and works exactly as it was designed.

It will be very great to define few people who will be able to handle ongoing communication with us(we won’t take too much of your time) and decision making. All results of different iterations of course we can share in the chat or via email.

We very like Prometheus and what does it mean for the dev/devops community so it deserves the great design, that we can help you create!

[Tobias Schmidt]

Heyo,

Were there more discussions around this? I'd volunteer to act as a contact from the Prometheus team, if that helps to keep this initiative moving forward.

Cheers,

Tobi

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/prometheus-developers/70f804fd-2909-494a-83e3-3fbda1b27478n%40googlegroups.com.

[Julius Volz]

Hi Tobi,

I just had another brief exchange with Alex privately a few days ago. As far as I understand it, his team will come up with a design idea in the next couple of weeks, but if anyone has specific desires around what they would want to communicate / include on the frontpage, please suggest it here :)

I'm obviously also interested in staying in touch about the details.

Julius

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/prometheus-developers/CAChBsdDevU87%3DjfR8Je-0dM%2B1h_pN2ys6bRPjJozpGot7PZ1pw%40mail.gmail.com.

[Julien Pivotto]

On 31 Oct 22:26, Julius Volz wrote:
> Hi Tobi,
>
> I just had another brief exchange with Alex privately a few days ago. As
> far as I understand it, his team will come up with a design idea in the
> next couple of weeks, but if anyone has specific desires around what they
> would want to communicate / include on the frontpage, please suggest it
> here :)
>
> I'm obviously also interested in staying in touch about the details.

I'd suggest bridging the team with RichiH, to see if we can have the
effort coupled directly with the upcoming revamp of the docs. I'd like
to see how the feedback from the tech writers could have an impact on
the look and feel of the website.

> >>>>> <https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/prometheus-developers/CA%2BT6YoyOodu6ySV1CfdKunNdsrDue_7bjH_4_1SqH1zKRekvng%40mail.gmail.com?utm_medium=email&utm_source=footer>
> >>>>> .

> >>>>>
> >>>> --
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> >> https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/prometheus-developers/70f804fd-2909-494a-83e3-3fbda1b27478n%40googlegroups.com
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> >> .

> >>
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--
Julien Pivotto
@roidelapluie

[Julius Volz]

On Sat, Oct 31, 2020 at 10:44 PM Julien Pivotto <roidel...@prometheus.io> wrote:

On 31 Oct 22:26, Julius Volz wrote:
> Hi Tobi,
>
> I just had another brief exchange with Alex privately a few days ago. As
> far as I understand it, his team will come up with a design idea in the
> next couple of weeks, but if anyone has specific desires around what they
> would want to communicate / include on the frontpage, please suggest it
> here :)
>
> I'm obviously also interested in staying in touch about the details.


I'd suggest bridging the team with RichiH, to see if we can have the
effort coupled directly with the upcoming revamp of the docs. I'd like
to see how the feedback from the tech writers could have an impact on
the look and feel of the website.

So at first this is focused on the landing page, and then Alex said the changes to the docs section would be minor (from their side).

Maybe RichiH's docs people still have landing page input though, I don't know. He said he'd be on vacation for a week, no idea if he's reading these emails here in the meantime :)