6 November 2013
Migration plan for the OCaml.org redesign
We’re close to releasing the new design of ocaml.org but need help from the OCaml community to identify and fix bugs before we switch next week.
Ashish, Christophe, Philippe and I have been discussing how we should go about this and below is the plan for migration. If anyone would like to discuss any of this, then the infrastructure list is the best place to do so.
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We’ve made a new branch on the main ocaml.org repository with the redesign. This branch is a fork of the master and we’ve simply cleaned up and replayed our git commits there.
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We’ve built a live version of the new site, which is visible at http://preview.ocaml.org - this is rebuilt every few minutes from the branch mentioned above.
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Over the course of one week, we ask the community to review the new site and report any bugs or problems on the issue tracker. We triage those bugs to identify any blockers and work on those first. This is the phase we’ll be in from today.
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After one week (7 days), and after blocking bugs have been fixed, we merge the redesign branch into the master branch. This would effectively present the new site to the world.
During the above, we would not be able to accept any new pull requests on the master branch but would be happy to accept them on the new, redesign branch. Hence, restricting the time frame to one week.
Please note that the above is only intended to merge the design and toolchain for the new site. Specifically, we’ve created new landing pages, have new style sheets and have restructured the site’s contents as well as made some new libraries (OMD and MPP). The new toolchain means people can write files in markdown, which makes contributing content a lot easier.
Since the files are on GitHub, people don’t even need to clone the site locally to make simple edits (or even add new pages). Just click the ‘Edit this page’ link in the footer to be taken to the right file in the repository and GitHub’s editing and pull request features will allow you to make changes and submit updates, all from within your browser (see the GitHub Article for details).
There is still work to be done on adding new features but the above changes are already a great improvement to the site and are ready to be reviewed by the OCaml community and merged.
