[Mailman-Developers] Redesign of List.org

[Barry Warsaw]

On Feb 22, 2015, at 10:48 PM, Athyuttam Reddy wrote:

>"Update visual style and information architecture of list.org and the wiki to
>feel more unified, be more navigable, and present a modern appearance”
>
>How can I contribute to the redesign? I’d love to work alongside anyone
>already taking the lead on this, and put my branding + UI/UX experience to
>use.

One of the things I like about the current site is that it's all static
files.  We have zero need for anything fancy like a CMS.

There are two big problems with the current site.  First, the design is pretty
1990s.  Second, it's built with really ancient tools.  ht2html is the
toolchain we use to turn template files into the site's HTML.  A bunch of us
wrote that originally back in 1999!

I've been (very slowly) looking at some more modern tools for building static
sites, including Pelican and Nikola.  Both are Python-based, available on
PyPI.  Of the two, I've had better luck with Nikola.

http://getnikola.com/

I've been trying to modernize my own personal sites using it and it's been
kind of nice, if a little quirky here and there.  I haven't rolled anything
out yet because I haven't had much time and I pretty much suck at web site
design.

In addition to being a static site generator, I really like that the content
can be written in reStructuredText, which is exactly the same format we use
for all core documentation.

We don't have a ton of content on the www site, but both Mark and I do update
it (him more than me).  The current site is built from this branch:

https://code.launchpad.net/~mailman-administrivia/mailman-administrivia/admin

So my thinking goes, take the basic content, give it a new shine, improve the
navigation, and build it using Nikola.  Keep all the source material under a
$vcs (I'm happy to move to git, but that's really dependent on Mark's
opinion).  I personally like the color scheme, but I think the only thing that
has to match is the logo (which I still love), and of course any thematic
changes would have to be matched by the wiki.

It would be cool for you or anyone else with interest to take a crack at this.

Cheers,
-Barry