Website rework

gcrk

Hi everyone.

Our website has a few flaws from my point of view:

Its built as a web application while its mostly static content
Its hard to maintain, keep dependencies updated and make sure the builds are successful

So I'd like to simplify this. Since we lately moved to Pelican with our Blog, it might be a good idea to use this for our homepage, too.

I started fooling around with this a little, the aim would be to keep ability to translate the content using weblate. This is what it currently looks like:

[upl-image-preview url=https://forum.funkwhale.audio/assets/files/2021-11-27/1638015478-151221-firefox-screenshot-2021-11-27t12-17-46588z.png]

Its obviously not a long way to go to get all the content from our website into the new one. But I'd like to open this for a discussion: Do you agree with a Website rework? I have a quite technical perspective, maybe there are other topics to talk about when doing a rework? Is the right content available, is it structured correctly? Just let me know what you think!

gcrk

So I built some more things. At first, below the full-screen Banner with a screenshot as shown above I want to have four columns to guide users to location where they can get some more information, depending on their use case:

[upl-image-preview url=https://forum.funkwhale.audio/assets/files/2021-11-28/1638125886-620856-firefox-screenshot-2021-11-28t18-57-57411z.png]

Additionally I tried to build a new instance picker. There I would like to use some cards to display information about the instances:

[upl-image-preview url=https://forum.funkwhale.audio/assets/files/2021-11-28/1638125853-128814-screenshot.png]

gcrk

For reference, this is the data we have available for the instance picker right now:

[upl-image-preview url=https://forum.funkwhale.audio/assets/files/2021-11-29/1638180794-153760-screenshot.png]

If we want to have other data, we need to update the network API (totally possible)

mjourdan

We have an issue on Gitlab for the instance picker:
https://dev.funkwhale.audio/funkwhale/funkwhale/-/issues/1359

gcrk

mjourdan Thank you for the pointer! I think we need to update the network API for most of the stuff which is present there. But thats not an huge issue.

For the time being I slightly improved the instance cards for the website rework:

[upl-image-preview url=https://forum.funkwhale.audio/assets/files/2021-11-29/1638211305-862184-screenshot.png]

gcrk

And another component for our blog posts:

[upl-image-preview url=https://forum.funkwhale.audio/assets/files/2021-11-29/1638213204-813811-screenshot.png]

I guess I touched most of the Bulma-mechanics now and I am ready to implement some real stuff 🙂

keunes

My two cents:

I would move the 'by a friendly community' elsewhere. It takes quite some horizontal space, and doesn't follow the same target audience pattern. (it feels out of place)
The updated instance card looks nice 🙂 (I would just hide the version number if the instance is up to date - it is duplicate information and not mega relevant for most website visitors - maybe a light or intense warning can be shown instead when the version is a bit or very old)
Making the website simpler to maintain sounds like a good thing 🙂