From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: Michael Tremer To: development@lists.ipfire.org Subject: Launching our new website Date: Thu, 04 Jan 2024 16:44:00 +0000 Message-ID: <3E0502D7-81BD-4E81-9E92-BF8F93BFA31D@ipfire.org> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: multipart/mixed; boundary="===============3386969082267714921==" List-Id: --===============3386969082267714921== Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8" Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable Hello everyone, (yes, yes, I am still alive=E2=80=A6) I would like to pre-announce our new website which Rico and I have been worki= ng on over the last couple of months, and collect some final feedback before = we roll it out as soon as possible. So here is an outline of what has happened and what will happen next: * Rico has helped me to implement a fresh design for our website which has be= en drafted by another friend. The goals were to get rid of the sad and grey w= ebsite, which is also *way* too simplistic, and create something that is nice= looking, memorable, and brings people in. * During that journey, we have waved goodbye to Bootstrap which is hard to wo= rk with once you have discovered Bulma (https://bulma.io/), our new CSS frame= work of choice. We have also rewritten and refactored some parts of the backe= nd code. There is now less Javascript and less CSS - and I am sure that we co= uld actually still go and save a lot more. * One of the biggest rewrites is fireinfo, as with a growing number of profil= es, our PostgreSQL database started to suffer. We haven=E2=80=99t tested this= in full production, yet, but I am sure this will be a lot faster than the ol= der version. This all only affects how we store the data and nothing changes = for the clients or users. * We have upgraded the PostgreSQL driver from psycopg2 to psycopg3, and we us= e async programming a lot more where possible (these are all lessons learned = from the build service). * We have replaced memcached with redis. Not because memcache didn=E2=80=99t = do its job well, but rather because of the reason that we have both in our in= frastructure and it is a little bit easier to just deploy one. * There is a new integration with Asterisk to see current calls - previously = the phone stuff didn=E2=80=99t work at all any more since we replaced FreePBX= with Asterisk. But that is enough about the technical stuff=E2=80=A6 Let=E2=80=99s talk abou= t what has visually changed, and why: * First of all, we have brighter colours. Very bright! Because we are a fun p= roject! The grey used to depress me slightly and if you ask a designer what w= ould represent us as a community, you get this. I am a lot happier with that. * The tux is gone. This is kind of a bitter sweet moment, but the old IPFire = =E2=80=9Clogo=E2=80=9D is gone with this. I am sure it will be found here or = there in a couple of places, but there is no way to make something ancient li= ke this work with something modern-looking. I spent days together with profes= sionals to draft a new logo, and we got nothing, well, apart from the simple = things that is: IPFire_ * IPFire_ is not supposed to replace the word =E2=80=9CIPFire=E2=80=9D in tex= ts, but I think it is a nice way to highlight the nerdiness/console people/Li= nux things without becoming complex to understand, or confusing to the corpor= ate people=E2=80=A6 * On top of the front page, we finally have some mission statement: More Than= A Firewall. We need to talk more about what we are and what we can do, and w= e need to explain (I don=E2=80=99t know why, but we do) to people what opport= unities IPFire can open for them. This still needs a lot of work and I am hap= py to hear any ideas what is a nice way to communicate what IPFire is to new = people using as few words as possible. * Then, there are a couple of new pages: One of the bigger ones is the About = page that explains in more detail what IPFire does (which is why it feels har= d to repeat the same on the front page) and it has a large list of (hopefully= ) all features that IPFire can do/supports/etc. This needs to be updated with= every core update, so please let me know if there is something missing in th= e future as I will probably miss them. Additionally, we have a section with u= s, the team. Being a faceless project is not very good to attract more people= joining our missing, and here is now the place where people will see us for = the first time - the people who make IPFire happen. * The download page has mainly been made shorter and now includes the change = log. Cloud providers have been added to an extra page. If you know of any clo= ud providers that support IPFire, please let me know. Torrent downloads are g= one. * Help: The help page has always been a hard one for me. This time it contain= s a sentence or two that explains what all those things are good for :) Let= =E2=80=99s see how that is going to work out=E2=80=A6 * This is a big one: We are getting rid of the thousand subdomains that we ar= e having. There is no more wiki.ipfire.org , blog.ip= fire.org , people.ipfire.org , location.ipfire.org , and so on (exception= s do apply of course). Everything is now in one place: ipfire.org . The blog is a subsection of the website, people register accounts = on the main page, log in, the documentation has moved there as well. This sho= uld hopefully make everyone happy who for a long time wanted buttons to chang= e from one thing to the next here. Here it finally is! * But there isn=E2=80=99t enough space for everything on the main navigation = bar. So at the bottom of the page, there is an extra link called =E2=80=9CSit= emap=E2=80=9D with all the other things that didn=E2=80=99t get a large link.= There is a lot of development stuff on there, too. * When logged in, the users area is a bit tidier and hopefully we are able to= bring a couple more features to this in the future=E2=80=A6 * Since users might also be logged in on the main page/the blog/etc. we show = =E2=80=9Cjoin us now=E2=80=9D and =E2=80=9Csubscribe to our newsletter=E2=80= =9D only when people have not already done so, which makes it a lot more obvi= ous what the next step of action for users is and a lot less confusing for th= e people who have already done so. * There has been a large list of bugs/feature requests submitted by a number = of people who have been fixed in this. We might have introduced a couple of n= ew ones, so please file a ticket in Bugzilla if something is broken and that = needs fixing. All in all we hope that this is a big first step to make IPFire appear the mo= dern distribution that it is, instead of having the dark image of some coders= in their basements. To summarise this all in one email feels very short for = all the labour that we have put into this over the years, but I suppose it is= a good sign to have simplicity in the end. We would like to ask you now for your feedback on all of this. I know that ma= ny of you have seen this before, but please help us to double check, that a b= ig launch does not become an embarrassment for some tiny reason :) We have ta= ken some risky decisions and we are happy to see how they are turning out=E2= =80=A6 The new website is currently running at https://www.michael.dev.ipfire.org/ t= o get to things like fireinfo, just change the subdomain like so https://fire= info.michael.dev.ipfire.org/. A couple of things like editing your own profil= e won=E2=80=99t work because the development instance can=E2=80=99t write to = our LDAP system, but apart from that, things should be running just fine. I am exciting to hear some feedback and hopefully we can build a small roadma= p out of it for the future! Best, -Michael & Rico --===============3386969082267714921==--