Website renovation

[Wilrakov]

Hello, I really like Free Pascal and I would like to contribute to its development. Many other programming languages ​​have a fairly modern website. The FPC website is very nice as it is, but its design is getting old. This certainly plays a role in the fact that fewer and fewer people are using it. I have some basic knowledge of web development, and if you don't mind, I would like to try to improve the site while keeping some elements that seem quite important to me  .

[Handoko]

Glad to know you want to offer your help to make the website better. Perhaps you can make a demo site showing us your idea, or at least show us some sketches.

[Wilrakov]

I'm going to work on a first demo version of the website and will come back to you to present it in a while. I'm glad you agree to let me present some of my ideas.

[TRon]

Free pascal website sources are located here.

The website is build, not designed.

[Wilrakov]

Thanks! I mainly want to modify the front-end, but I don't really understand where to modify the actual structure of the pages...
I imagine it's in the adp2html transpiler.

I find the adp file system quite intelligent, even though I personally would have preferred HTML because I'm not yet familiar with adp. It's okay, I'll learn.

[TRon]

Wish I was able to help out there Wilrakov but in all honestly I never played with the website itself.

I say this with the greatest respect to the maintainers but for these kind of projects a website is more like a bit of an afterthought (nobody has actually time to work on it). It should be easy to maintain fast, and take up as little time as possible.

In that regards a overhaul by someone that has a bit more time on his/her hands would probably be appreciated (no idea but I take a guess there) but it might perhaps be a good idea to have a conversation with one of the maintainers in order to get on the same page (in case there is any).

I don't believe you can post issues in the bug-tracker of the website repository but the merge requests seem present.

[marcov]

Thanks! I mainly want to modify the front-end, but I don't really understand where to modify the actual structure of the pages...
I imagine it's in the adp2html transpiler.

It is a simple template generator with a json configuration. The menu template is site-master.adp.

[CM630]

The website looks fine to me.
Maybe the image on the top of the page should not be fixed, but changing, showing different views of Lazarus.
So IMHO before changing anything, maybe some sample views shall be presented, to determine which looks better.


Compare:
https://www.arduino.cc
https://www.python.org
https://visualstudio.microsoft.com
https://www.java.com/en/ (do we have a female model to compete with it)?

[dseligo]

https://www.arduino.cc
https://www.python.org
https://visualstudio.microsoft.com
https://www.java.com/en/ (do we have a female mode to compete with it)?

Lazarus' website have grey margin (border) on left and right side. All these other sites occupy full width of screen.

[TRon]

I forgot to mention the Lazarus website repository which can be found here.

[Wilrakov]

Well, if you're happy with the current site, we can leave it as it is, but we still need to make a mobile version.

[Aruna]

Well, if you're happy with the current site, we can leave it as it is, but we still need to make a mobile version.

Hello Wilrakov, the site I believe is fully responsive and mobile friendly. It uses bootstrap to do this. Please have a look at the attached screenshot. Why not build a mock-up with your *improvements* if you're so inclined and do have the time then share a link so others can have a look and give you feedback?

[Wilrakov]

A few months ago, I told the Free Pascal community that I wanted to work on a redesign of the website. At the time, I considered directly improving the official codebase, but I eventually gave up, as I didn't want to dive into the tedious process of modifying the existing structure.

In the meantime, I focused on other personal projects.

Recently, I decided to start from scratch and build a modern, lightweight version of the Free Pascal website for those who might be interested. This project is completely independent and unofficial, but I hope it can serve as inspiration or simply as an alternative, more modern version to explore the Free Pascal resources.
https://freepascal.vercel.app
https://github.com/wilrakov/fp-website

[Martin_fr]

I am not in the FPC team, so this isn't an official response.

Nice to see that you provide something, to show you put your money where your mouth is. Definitely puts you way above the masses.

https://freepascal.vercel.app

Unfortunately as my personal taste goes...

Ouch, dark. Too dark. Bad for my eyes... Sorry, but it's a fact that things are easier to spot at daytime when its light, than at night in a dark alley. I know that "dark" is "modern" or "cool", but its not worth my health.
I don't mind if others want to add stress to their eyes. (Or reduce it, because a dark site, is indeed better if you are unable or unaware of the need to correctly set the brightness of your screen and environment).
But at least make it a choice.
Well you don't need for me, since I am not the target audience: I already have fpc, and download it from git, and haven't been on the official homepage in a long time.

Also, it does nothing in my browner at first, because I have JS disabled. Other pages have the courtesy to at least tell me that I need to enable it, and many open source project sites work without.

And well, yes not a big fan of the "fade in" effects, but they are in line with the rest of the page. So from a less personal, and more objective view: Nice.

While there are buttons at the top (because it took me ages to figure that I could also just scroll), the home page is oddly empty. If I where new, and came to that page, then all I get to see is the
- name
- download button
- the menu on the top telling me, I need to click to other pages to get any information at all.
I would have to be very interested to start with, so that I would follow any of them, rather than just leaving.
There should be at least some teaser info on the first page. Like current version, and at least the headings of the key features or something like that.
Or add the version, and have some small header/banner of the next page "lurking" in at the bottom "next ...", to make it more recognizable that extra info is just a scroll away.

For me personally, I also am very fond of webpages giving me a quick way to get to a changelog. So I can decide if I want a new version. That doesn't have to be on the home page, but would be nice on the download page.


Sorry for the amount of critic. Some is just my taste. Some maybe might help to improve the page.

Again, thanks for putting the time in to show your vision.

[Martin_fr]

Some more follow up. Ignoring that I personally don't like the fade in. When I test responsive (using firefox, inspect,
testing responsive)...
- Then the menu becomes a drop down (indicated by the 3 lines) => fine.
- When I open it, the menu with all entries is immediately shown
- Then the entries disappear, and fade in (from the side)

That seems odd. Why show, hide, fade in?

--------

Also, while I am not into dark, in responsive, the last page (with all the download buttons) is such that the buttons take 90% of the screen space, and only 10% are background color.
Since the buttons are brighter than the background color, scrolling down, my screen suddenly lights up.

Given that (against my desire) my pupils by that time have adjusted for "night in a dark alley", the sudden brightness actually was like blindingly bright....

The overall brightness coming from the entire page should not change by such major differences.