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 For some other pages or areas (e.g. doc/books, misc/merchandise, /users) we found that the content is outdated and the team can not maintain it, we agreed in issuing a call for help (request for adoption) and if we cannot find volunteers for those pages/areas, we'll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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