the new oVirt website: live preview!

[Garrett LeSage]

On 09/19/2012 03:38 PM, Ewoud Kohl van Wijngaarden wrote:
> Awesome job to base it on mediawiki. 

Thanks!

> I love having a single place to edit the site, guarded by permissions 
> for stuff like the frontpage. 

Yeah, I think it'll make a much more cohesive site, and would make it 
easier for everyone to edit everything (provided they have permissions 
to do so — but I'm only suggesting the main pages be locked down to a 
select group).

> How easy to maintain is it when we want to upgrade mediawiki? 

Two of my main goals when making this were to make the site:
1) editable by all
2) easily maintainable for the oVirt infrastructure team

A complimentary goal was to make the skin:
3) reusable by others

I met all three above goals by basing it on MediaWiki's default theme 
"Vector" (although it has a lot of changes) and also on Twitter's 
Bootstrap, so that we would benefit from updates from both projects, and 
we can use formatting from each. (Basically: Near-instant documentation 
and support for updates!)

Since I intentionally made the base skin reusable, it *could* easily be 
picked up by other sites. (The oVirt theme is just a little layer on top 
of the MediaWiki skin that simply changes the fonts and colors and adds 
a little bit of oVirt style elsewhere in the site too.) The more popular 
it is elsewhere, the more bugfixes, improvements, and quick updates to 
new MediaWiki versions we'll get.


> Haven't checked it in-depth yet but I'm wondering if the search should 
> be promoted to the top navigation. 

I've gotten a lot of feedback about that. I'm going to consider ways to 
fit it in.

It's probably useful to point out that oVirt.org, right now, doesn't 
have a working search (try searching for "download", "git", etc.) — yet 
it's one of the most prominent elements. The theme, as-is, is a huge 
step in the right direction, as search actually *works*. (The results 
still need to be a bit beautified, but that's on the todo.)

Also, I strongly believe search shouldn't be *needed* on a site... but 
it's good to have, however. People should be able to find the content 
they're looking for without having to resort to a search. On a website, 
search should secondary to navigation and hyperlinked content, used when 
all else fails.


> Also would like to a see a difference in existing and non-existing links. 

It's actually there in the CSS, but I commented it out for now, as most 
all of the links are non-existing.

Here's how it works:

* When you're signed in, right now the links turn orange. I could make 
them red (like the default) or underlined or strikethrough — or even 
blink (if we really wanted to). I could also display icons or text 
before or afterward too.

* When you're *not* signed in, I will have it so that the link doesn't 
change color or change the mouse when it is hovered. (Basically: it 
looks like the text on the rest of the page.) Naturally, since we don't 
have much content on this website preview right now, and I wanted to 
display what it _would_ look like on the actual site, I decided to 
disable this feature for the time being.

-=-=-

Thanks for the feedback!
Garrett