Dear all
Below you can find the report of the sprint that some members of the
Debian web team had last March.
The Summary part will be posted as article in bits.debian.org soon, with
photo :-)
Thanks Rhonda, Steve, Thomas and Carsten for coming, thanks to everybody
who made it possible, and to all the teammates that before and after the
sprint are helping with the improvement of the Debian website. Hopefully
we'll meet again in the future!
Kind regards,
--
Laura Arjona Reina
https://wiki.debian.org/LauraArjona
# Report of the Debian Web Team Sprint
## Summary
The [Debian Web team](https://wiki.debian.org/Teams/Webmaster) held a
[sprint](https://wiki.debian.org/Sprints/2019/DebianWebTeam) for the
first time, in Madrid (Spain) from March 15th to March 17th, 2019.
We discussed the status of the Debian website in general, review several
important pages/sections and agreed on many things how to improve them.
For the sections we want to reorganise (mainly the homepage and a new
section "download" which will group our current "CD" and "distrib"
sections) , we have designed this workflow:
* Create branches in the webwml repo,
* Agreed on the new or modified content (started already during the
sprint), and work on them further after the sprint
* Review a lot of related open bugs to see if we can address them with
the new content (done during the sprint)
* Create bug reports for the things that cannot be solved quickly to
keep them tracked (started during the sprint)
* We agreed we should get further help from web designers/information
architects (pending)
* Once the English version is more or less settled, call for
translations on the branch (pending)
* If we have English and the main translations ready, merging into the
master branch (pending)
* We will try to have at least the homepage and the download section
ready for the Buster release.
We also agreed that the press delegates should decide what new News
entry is worth to be posted in the homepage instead of showing the last
6 entries.
For some other pages or areas (e.g. doc/books, misc/merchandise, /users)
we found that the content is outdated and the team can not maintain it,
we agreed in issuing a call for help (request for adoption) and if we
cannot find volunteers for those pages/areas, we'll remove the content
or move it to wiki.debian.org at the end of 2019.
We have agreed that we'll need to reduce the size (number of pages) of
the website (*see some numbers about statistics at bottom) so it's more
sustainable to keep the whole website up-to-date (content wise), so
we'll remove some pages having content already covered in other pages,
having content that currently is easy discoverable with a web search
engine, can be maintained better in the wiki, etc.
We have talked a bit about certain other aspects like point release
workflow, the build time of the website, team memberships and
governance. In general the sprint has shown that for most of the
discussed topics the migration to git as VCS and the existence of Salsa
is a huge step forward for the usability and attractiveness for
contributors of the webwml repository.
The core webteam is happy that the sprint has also attracted new people
to jump in and which are also members of the webteam now. We welcome
Thomas Lange and Carsten Schoenert in our team!
Finally, we have passed time together to socialize and knowing each
other better, and got very motivated to continue working on the web.
The participants would like to thank all donors to the Debian project
who helped to cover a large part of our expenses.
## Details
### Debian website homepage (www.debian.org/index)
Thomas Lange had made a proposal of a new homepage in DebConf18, and we
came back to it and agreed on how to deploy it.
We have two main goals in mind: To simplify the starting homepage so
it's more attractive to newcomers, and to show the social aspect of the
project as well as the operating system that we develop.
A review of the whole website is also needed at some time, but we agreed
on starting with the homepage and the pages that will be accessed from
it. So the basic proposal is:
Homepage:
Debian is about People
People
Philosophy
Get involved
More (here you can access all the pages that are present currently
in the website and not linked above)
Debian is an OS
Download
Security
Support
More (here you can access all the pages that are present currently
in the website and not linked above)
All this is being done in the [branch new-homepage of the webwml
repo](https://salsa.debian.org/webmaster-team/webwml/tree/new-homepage).
You can see the most recent WIP homepage in
https://debian-newhomepage.larjona.net
Related bugs:
#696873 [n| | ] [www.debian.org] Better place for "download
debian" button
#815689 [n| | ] [www.debian.org] www.debian.org: Show recent
project news (not only announcements + security updates) on the homepage
#862980 [n|⎈| ] [www.debian.org] Update the homepage, to show
the social face of the project, and be more attractive for newcomers
#188617 [w| | ] [www.debian.org] www.debian.org: [front page]
would like link to intro/organization from left-side navbar
#905352 [w| | ] [www.debian.org] add section "Why Debian" to
the home page
#924942 [w| | ] [www.debian.org] www.debian.org: Suggestion; on
the new people page, add a welcome message and a photo of the current DPL
We also agreed that the press delegates will decide what new News entry
is worth to be posted in the homepage
instead of showing the last 6 entries.
### CD/Distrib sections
We have several long standing bugs about the CD and distrib sections,
these sections should be merged together and also they need to be
simplified and with specific step by step instructions.
We don't want that the download button in the homepage downloads a
specific ISO any more, instead we'd like it to take the user to a simple
page explaining how to choose their preferred image, download it,
verify it and install (see below in this report for details).
We created an initial new structure of the new "Download" page, agreed
on its content, and created a [branch
new-cd_distrib-section](https://salsa.debian.org/webmaster-team/webwml/tree/new-cd_distrib-section)
to work on it.
You can see the WIP download page in
https://debian-newdownload.larjona.net/download
Related bugs:
#819664 Re-organise the CD / download pages to make them more useful
#695681 document available cloud options under www.debian.org/distrib/
#720989 [n| | ] [www.debian.org] www.debian.org: unexperienced
users fail to download installation media especially for usb drives
#851541 [n| | ] [www.debian.org] www.debian.org: CD/verify
should include long key IDs
#902668 [n| | ] [www.debian.org] Draft for rewrite of
https://www.debian.org/CD/verify
#381555 [w| | ] [www.debian.org]
http://www.debian.org/CD/netinst/ : add link to iso md5 checksum
#612116 [w| | ] [www.debian.org] www.debian.org: /CD/ should
now redirect to the new /distrib/
#640054 [w| | ] [www.debian.org] Download pages should have
prominent links to image verification instructions
#705209 [w| | ] [www.debian.org] www.debian.org: Ask for a
donation while people are downloading Debian
#709004 [w|+| ] [www.debian.org] www.debian.org: Please mention
win32-loader on "Getting Debian" webpage
#722906 [w| |=] [www.debian.org] Document additional methods for
validating Debian-distributed files
#797342 [w| | ] [www.debian.org] www.debian.org: simple and
easy to use download page
#925300 [n| | ] [www.debian.org] Debian home page: Cleaning up
the "Getting Started" paragraph
## Review of other sections
Some info that is shown in our homepage had made sense many years ago
but now it's irrelevant because anybody can find the same info or even
more updated using a simple web search.
So we have agreed on removing these:
* /events/speakers
* /misc/related_links
* /ports/beowulf pages (and review/remove other mentions)
* obsolete pages about CVS, and links to them
We have issued "RFA (Request for Adoption)" mails (call for help) in
these pages/sections
* /doc/books
* /misc/merchandise
* /users
And gladly several persons already jumped in and offered to volunteer on
maintaining those :-)
### Other work
Simplified the built-time code massively and make it correct by stop
trying to use the GEN_TIME stuff, and just use gmtime() directly in
english/template/debian/ctime.wml
We'd like to change the footer with list of languages because sometimes
is too long, so we're working in a list of languages able to be
shown/hidden with CSS styling.
Rhonda has done some work.
Related Bug:
#924889 [n| | ] [www.debian.org] Use a drop down selector
(without JS) to switch the language of the website
### Review of bug list
We have reviewed the bug list and during the sprint or soon after it we
have closed these bugs:
#614233 [n| | ] [www.debian.org] www.debian.org: Debian = "Debian
GNU/Linux" + "Debian GNU/kFreeBSD"
#924888 [n| | ] [www.debian.org] try to remove the /misc section
(reviewing and reorganising content)
#251218 [w| | ] [www.debian.org] /devel/people gives recognition
for quantity of packages, not quality
#320426 [w| | ] [www.debian.org] www.debian.org: Releases page
doesn't advise mailing list sub
#439671 [w|☹| ] [www.debian.org] doc-debian: bug in social
contract, section 4?
#515814 [w| | ] [www.debian.org] www.debian.org: Please provide
source for pdf-graphics in devel/debian-med/News/2009/20090214.wml
#845297 [n| | ] [www.debian.org] [www.debian.org] Website
transition from CVS to Git
#924135 [n| | ] [www.debian.org] clean-up: old .cvsignore files
#197392 [m| | ] [www.debian.org] several www.debian.org URLs
contain capital letters
#98811 [w| | ] [www.debian.org] Future or updated pages should use
XHTML 1 if possible
#832920 [n| | ] [www.debian.org] redirect HTTP to HTTPS on
www.debian.org
#924120 [n| | ] [www.debian.org] Say "netinst multi-arch CD images"
#924164 [n| | ] [www.debian.org] Don't say use Jigdo
### Governance and workflows
We have noticed that the group of people behind webmaster@debian.org,
the group of people in the debwww group and the group of people "owner"
in the Salsa repos are not the same. We'll try to communicate with
everybody involved and review each of those permission groups.
### Statistics:
52000 wml files over all!
891 consultants
1046 vote
1170 releases
1801 devel
2024 users
2656 events (only events until 2013)
7809 News
31631 security
--
Laura Arjona Reina
https://wiki.debian.org/LauraArjona
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