Can a GSOD slot be used to improve the website?
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Jason Moore
May 25, 2020, 12:20:01 PM5/25/20
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I was admiring the new NumPy website: https://numpy.org/ and thinking how some of these elements, design, and features could be a nice improvement to the SymPy website. The new NumPy website really gives an air of being a professional piece of software that is a foundation for so many other things. SymPy is also similarly professional and influential but I'm not sure our website makes that as clear as it could be.
Can one of the GSOD topics be a website overhall?
Jason
Aaron Meurer
May 25, 2020, 2:31:30 PM5/25/20
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Yes, it can. I believe the NumPy site was improved at least partly
through GSoD. Can you add an idea for it to the GSoD ideas page?
Aaron Meurer
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through GSoD. Can you add an idea for it to the GSoD ideas page?
Aaron Meurer
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Jason Moore
May 25, 2020, 3:19:34 PM5/25/20
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Siddhartha Kapoor
May 26, 2020, 1:52:53 AM5/26/20
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Hey Jason
I am a GSoD applicant, and I have been following numpy.org since it's release. I have also been using sympy for quite some time and I feel I can pitch in regarding this idea. I had the following ideas in mind -
1. The current website https://www.sympy.org/en/index.html can use restructuring, it wastes a lot of whitespace under the subheading 'Projects Using SymPy'. The restructuring would include -
a. Getting logos for the projects using SymPy
b. a fixed navbar like https://numpy.org/
c. cleaner UI (I can make a template and will be happy to propose one)
d. adding in CSS animations wherever necessary
2. The features tab (https://www.sympy.org/en/features.html) has a lot of drop down menus but most of the headings have no references (apart from a single documentation link) which can be really confusing for a first time user. The task would be to point a beginner in the right direction hence the job would be to make it more beginner friendly. Also the grid layout needs to be arranged a little better so as to not waste the space.
Please let me know if anyone would be willing to take this up and I would appreciate any feedback, I have prior experience in HTML CSS Vanilla JS and React.JS. Link to my portfolio is https://fir-website-b6d6c.web.app/
Regards
Siddharth Kapoor
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Jason Moore
May 26, 2020, 1:57:04 AM5/26/20
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Aaron Meurer
May 26, 2020, 3:34:57 AM5/26/20
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Yes, this sounds great. We can also get in touch with the people who
designed the NumPy site to see if they can share their experiences
with improving it (I work with some of the people who were on the
project and I would be happy to reach out).
Aaron Meurer
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designed the NumPy site to see if they can share their experiences
with improving it (I work with some of the people who were on the
project and I would be happy to reach out).
Aaron Meurer
Siddhartha Kapoor
May 26, 2020, 3:42:08 AM5/26/20
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Thanks Aaron and Jason for all the feedback, I can surely come up with a proposal and share it with you for any more discussions.
Regards
Siddharth
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S.Y. Lee
May 27, 2020, 5:22:52 AM5/27/20
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I see numpy.org is now using hugo.
We may have consider changing the static site generator likeAaron Meurer
May 27, 2020, 1:31:12 PM5/27/20
to sympy
It is a possibility. It mainly depends on what we would gain from doing so.
I would add that, at least in my opinion, our website isn't in too bad
of a state, especially compared to the NumPy site as it was before the
refactor. As a reminder, this is what it used to look like
https://web.archive.org/web/20200519014349/https://numpy.org/
But one thing I would agree with is that it can be difficult to add
content to our website. So in that sense, a better static site
generator could offer some benefits.
Aaron Meurer
I would add that, at least in my opinion, our website isn't in too bad
of a state, especially compared to the NumPy site as it was before the
refactor. As a reminder, this is what it used to look like
https://web.archive.org/web/20200519014349/https://numpy.org/
But one thing I would agree with is that it can be difficult to add
content to our website. So in that sense, a better static site
generator could offer some benefits.
Aaron Meurer
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Jason Moore
May 27, 2020, 1:51:22 PM5/27/20
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I think a GSOD spot would be better spent on working on content, not tooling and other things. Its a key distinction in the GSoC and GSoD programs. The docs program is supposed to be suitable for people that don't necessarily have programming know how.
Jason
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Aaron Meurer
May 27, 2020, 2:03:37 PM5/27/20
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I 100% agree with Jason here. In fact, I would say that the mentors
should help do any programming/tooling related fixes that are needed
to support the GSoD technical writers. This makes GSoD a harder
program to mentor than GSoC.
Aaron Meurer
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should help do any programming/tooling related fixes that are needed
to support the GSoD technical writers. This makes GSoD a harder
program to mentor than GSoC.
Aaron Meurer
S.Y. Lee
May 27, 2020, 2:21:18 PM5/27/20
to sympy
It just gives an another reason to hurry up setting up the static web framework.
Unfortunately, I don't think that it is possible to edit sympy.org than messing with html files, besides the translations, so it will not be easy for technical writers.
On Tuesday, May 26, 2020 at 1:20:01 AM UTC+9, Jason Moore wrote:
Aaron Meurer
May 27, 2020, 4:27:28 PM5/27/20
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I think we can modify the backend, but we should be prepared as
mentors to do the programming work. Conversely, I don't know if it
would make sense to make any changes without feedback from a technical
writer if we are going to get one, so I don't know if it makes sense
to do anything like this now, aside from initial research into what
alternatives are out there.
Aaron Meurer
mentors to do the programming work. Conversely, I don't know if it
would make sense to make any changes without feedback from a technical
writer if we are going to get one, so I don't know if it makes sense
to do anything like this now, aside from initial research into what
alternatives are out there.
Aaron Meurer
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Nicolas Guarin
May 28, 2020, 11:46:02 AM5/28/20
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I think that using a static generator would have advantages from the translation point-of-view as well.
Nikhil Maan
Sep 22, 2020, 9:07:55 AM9/22/20
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Hey folks,
I would like to work on this as a NUMFOCUS grant project. What kind of changes do we want in the website?
As for the static generators, in my experience, I found hugo to be simpler and easier to use for everyone and it also has a vast library of themes that we can use. The main problem I've had with it is it's in a pre v1 release, so some things do tend to break sometimes with some releases.
I would like to work on this as a NUMFOCUS grant project. What kind of changes do we want in the website?
As for the static generators, in my experience, I found hugo to be simpler and easier to use for everyone and it also has a vast library of themes that we can use. The main problem I've had with it is it's in a pre v1 release, so some things do tend to break sometimes with some releases.
Jason Moore
Sep 22, 2020, 10:32:07 AM9/22/20
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Nikhil,
I recommend creating some kind of survey with carefully crafted questions to discover what the SymPy community (users and devs) might want in a website upgrade. Maybe you can come up with 5 or 6 key questions that take < 5 mins to complete to try to get a broad sampling of opinions and then advertise it beyond the mailing list and Github. Given the results, I would lean to prioritizing SymPy user needs over SymPy developer needs in the work you do. It may be tempting to spend lots of time on a fancy website build system instead of updating the content, organization, and appearance of the website, but I believe the latter is much more important.
As for choice in static site generators I'd recommend 1) choosing one that is very likely to be popular and well maintained in the long run, 2) reduces the amount of work needed to convert from the current website, 3) and, if possible, written in Python because our community knows Python and will have little trouble writing extensions, modifications, for any special things we desire.
Good idea! Share the proposal as you draft it and we can give you feedback.
Jason
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Aaron Meurer
Sep 22, 2020, 3:56:54 PM9/22/20
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I'm curious what you see as the limitations of the existing website? I personally think our current website is fine. Maybe some of the content could be improved or moved around a bit, but I don't know if that necessitates a new static generator for it.
Aaron Meurer
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Nikhil Maan
Sep 26, 2020, 5:59:39 PM9/26/20
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I don't think the website has any major limitations. It's still pretty good and definitely does the job. But it can still use some minor improvements.
Here are some of the things I think can be updated. The landing page looks a little cluttered, we can clean that up a little bit. The last change to the roadmap was 2 years ago, might as well update it. I think the support and Development pages can also be merged and improved, and the other pages can also use a revision. Sometimes from the looks, the website feels it was created by someone as a hobby for a project handled by a couple of people, not a project with hundreds of developers, but that's just my opinion.
Now, our conference, PyCon India, is getting really close, so I'm a little crunched on time this weekend. So, I'll come up with the survey questions for users in a couple of days, sometime this week. We can also advertise the survey on our twitter along with the mailing list and GitHub.
As for the static generator, let me do some research and see if changing to another generator would bring any useful feature without much effort of porting. I'll come back to that and create an issue if I find something suitable that can be useful to us, otherwise, we can just revise and update the content.
P.S.: Going through the website, I checked the IRC logs, and they look mostly empty except a few people joining and leaving sometime. So, we have an IRC channel? and we're not using it?
Regards,
Nikhil Maan
Here are some of the things I think can be updated. The landing page looks a little cluttered, we can clean that up a little bit. The last change to the roadmap was 2 years ago, might as well update it. I think the support and Development pages can also be merged and improved, and the other pages can also use a revision. Sometimes from the looks, the website feels it was created by someone as a hobby for a project handled by a couple of people, not a project with hundreds of developers, but that's just my opinion.
Now, our conference, PyCon India, is getting really close, so I'm a little crunched on time this weekend. So, I'll come up with the survey questions for users in a couple of days, sometime this week. We can also advertise the survey on our twitter along with the mailing list and GitHub.
As for the static generator, let me do some research and see if changing to another generator would bring any useful feature without much effort of porting. I'll come back to that and create an issue if I find something suitable that can be useful to us, otherwise, we can just revise and update the content.
P.S.: Going through the website, I checked the IRC logs, and they look mostly empty except a few people joining and leaving sometime. So, we have an IRC channel? and we're not using it?
Regards,
Nikhil Maan
Aaron Meurer
Sep 26, 2020, 6:30:08 PM9/26/20
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We used to use IRC a long time ago, but we stopped when we switched to gitter. We should probably close down the channel and remove the link to the logs. I think we left them up because the logging service we used had a requirement that we have a link to the logs on our website.
Aaron Meurer
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