Short explanation why I suggested pelican:

1.) in the CentOS web universe like you said there are existing bunch of different techs and styles, but imho trending to python (bottle, flask)

2.) pelican is based on jinja templates. you can also use jinja with bottel, flask, django. ansible uses jinja too.

3.) maybe in the future ... to collaborate web solutions, it's easy with jinja temps and a python based full stack web framework for example django.

4.) CentOS has the focus of providing an OS and not a web platform ... so maybe ruby is better for web dev from the technical perspective, but imho python fits more the needs of the whole project.

5.) keep it simple and not use too much different techs or programming langs.

Imho it could also a good choice to choose a Javascript framework. So that Javascript is used for web and manuals like antora (asciidoc instead of rst (sphinx) would be my next question :D).

I like to know why you chose ruby for further development ?

best regards, florian

ps: I'm not a web developer. I just want to understand the decision and contribute to the project.

On 3/27/19 4:51 PM, Rich Bowen wrote:

On 3/27/19 7:02 AM, Florian Winter wrote:

...

Hi all,

I'd like to contribute to websites belonging to CentOS. How can I start, what's the best way ? One suggestion I have, is to migrate centos.org from nanoc to a python based static site generator for example pelican.

There is already a prototype that JBrooks is working on to move the website from nanoc to Jekyll, which should be a huge improvement in terms of making it easier for other people to contribute. I hope to have more detail on this on Friday.

One thing that we would like to do is identify portions of content that are in the wiki (optimized for frequently changing content) that should instead be on the main website (optimized for more static content).

We also need help with consistent cross-site themeing.

We have several websites, each of which has its own unique visual identity:

www.centos.org wiki.centos.org centos.org/forums blog.centos.org

Additionally, we have our various social media presences, which each have their own theme.

It would be great to have a unified theme across all of these sites, which ties them together, as well as more consistent navigation so that getting between sites isn't so challenging.

On 3/27/19 8:40 PM, Rich Bowen wrote:

Because it's what Github Pages uses, and thus what a lot of people may already be familiar with.

For the most part, almost nobody touching content will need to even be aware that Ruby is involved. They'll write Markdown, and it will Just Work.

Was the decision announced / discussed on the mailing list or a SIG ?

Beyond that, I don't have any strong opinions one way or the other, except that the work has already been done in the Jekyll implementation

Is there any source, where I can read what's going on, who is developing what and why, for example Jason Brooks Jekyll repo ?

best regards, florian

On 3/28/19 3:53 PM, Fabian Arrotin wrote:

I don't remember if that was discussed at all .. but if it was, it was probably on the centos-docs list :)I searched the centos-devel/docs archive and couldn't find an announcement.

https://github.com/jasonbrooks/centos.org

I don't think such list exist, and also if something like this is done, I'd love to see that on either git.centos.org (and migration coming soon to pagure, so easier collaboration) or github.com/CentOS ?

I think something like this would be great, to know what's going on, where to contribute, avoid repeating questions from contributors and so on ...

On 3/28/19 11:32 AM, Florian Winter wrote:

On 3/28/19 3:53 PM, Fabian Arrotin wrote:

...

I don't remember if that was discussed at all .. but if it was, it was probably on the centos-docs list :)I searched the centos-devel/docs archive and couldn't find an announcement.

https://github.com/jasonbrooks/centos.org

...

I don't think such list exist, and also if something like this is done, I'd love to see that on either git.centos.org (and migration coming soon to pagure, so easier collaboration) or github.com/CentOS ?

I think something like this would be great, to know what's going on, where to contribute, avoid repeating questions from contributors and so on ...

Hey, Florian,

On reading more, I see that I misunderstood what Pelican is - that it's another generate-a-static-site tool, like Jekyll, not a dynamic web framework. Thus, content would still be maintained in markdown, making it easy for the community to submit site changes/patches.

That kind of changes the conversation for me.

So ... I was wondering, is this something that you'd have the time and willingness to spearhead, if we went that direction instead of Jekyll? The content is already in markdown, and so moving to Pelican should be pretty much drop-in. We have a handful of elements on the site that are dynamic-ish (like the sponsor listing) but most of it is just static content.

What you do you think?

On Fri, Mar 29, 2019, 14:08 Florian Winter florianwinter@leetbit.com wrote:

Hi Rich,

I don't know how the CentOS community decide such development decisions. If everyone agrees to this, I think I can do the task.

Mostly we run it by folks here, and, in particular make sure that folks like Fabian, who will be stuck maintaining it, are ok with it.

On 3/31/19 9:54 PM, Fabian Arrotin wrote:

So the idea is that each tool (or complete toolchain) that we need to use to build/produce whatever should be available on a long-term. So the 'hey, I found a container that does this today' isn't usually a good idea, except if we can come with a receipe (Dockerfile) that we can use to rebuild the needed containers/layers every week , or have some RPM pkgs already available too.

If we look at the current solution used for www.centos.org, it's built in nanoc, for which we have a container available through https://registry.centos.org From a user PoV, it's explained in the README.md file how to get it and so build locally the website for local rendering, etc

From a sysadmin PoV, here is the Dockerfile that is used to rebuild every week the container/and get automatic scan from the registry.centos.org pipeline (kudos to the team in charge of this btw !) Container : https://registry.centos.org/arrfab/nanoc Dockerfile/CCCP for registry.centos.org : https://github.com/arrfab/container_nanoc

probably I've completley misunderstood your email ... but imho I can't see a problem to provide the same mechanism (docker) as it exists for nanoc. Maybe another solution could be, to create an ansible role for providing the page and a docker container for developing.

cheers, florian

On 3/28/19 10:50 AM, Florian Winter wrote:

On 3/27/19 8:40 PM, Rich Bowen wrote:

...

Because it's what Github Pages uses, and thus what a lot of people may already be familiar with.

For the most part, almost nobody touching content will need to even be aware that Ruby is involved. They'll write Markdown, and it will Just Work.

Was the decision announced / discussed on the mailing list or a SIG ?

It was briefly discussed on centos-promo, and on the docs list.

...

Beyond that, I don't have any strong opinions one way or the other, except that the work has already been done in the Jekyll implementation

Is there any source, where I can read what's going on, who is developing what and why, for example Jason Brooks Jekyll repo ?

Jason's work is at https://github.com/jasonbrooks/centos.org

There's a container there that you can run. Instructions in the README.

--Rich

On 3/28/19 12:25 AM, Karanbir Singh wrote:

What / how this was laid out was that the main website at

www.centos.org

would be focused on the Project, and the wiki would be more focused on the content, community, code and the distro itself.

I think the question is : What perspective / interaction does a user prefer ? A wiki feeling like with archlinux, debian etc. or more web oriented like freebsd, red hat etc.

Based on this decision it's possible to discuss about techs, migrating content and so on ...

best regards, florian