From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: Michael Tremer To: development@lists.ipfire.org Subject: Re: Launching our new website Date: Sat, 06 Jan 2024 14:03:55 +0000 Message-ID: <61E4C11A-CA80-41BF-BDB6-4A72F0759B10@ipfire.org> In-Reply-To: <57E1B76D-8F9D-433F-99AF-1A3449443704@rymes.net> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: multipart/mixed; boundary="===============1261005123923502179==" List-Id: --===============1261005123923502179== Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8" Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable Hello Tom, Thank you for your feedback! > On 4 Jan 2024, at 23:44, Tom Rymes wrote: >=20 > I really like it at first glance, though the red used in the banner on this= page (and I think it=E2=80=99s all over the place, I just didn=E2=80=99t con= firm) is too close to magenta to my eyes. It=E2=80=99s bright, but more tropi= cal flower than fire, IMHO (it clashes a bit with the fire video on the homep= age). Is it a bad thing to be close to magenta? The colour is not meant to represent fire. It is just, that for a firewall, w= e are generally in the =E2=80=9Cred=E2=80=9D section instead of blue or green= . There are some companies that have tried it, and I don=E2=80=99t think it h= as worked well. Then, people have done the =E2=80=9Cblood red=E2=80=9D approach, and to disti= nguish ourselves we used to have a darker (kind of maroon) red. And since I f= ound that depressing, I thought that we could rather go lighter=E2=80=A6 and = this is the result. The fire video didn=E2=80=99t come from the designer and he was slightly oppo= sed to it :) The red should however never be right next to the video. > https://www.michael.dev.ipfire.org/downloads/ipfire-2.27-core182 What I did get as negative feedback before was that the red is quite bright (= as in: burns your eyes). I use Apple devices which have generally good colour= representation and this feedback came from people that didn=E2=80=99t have c= alibrated screens (brightness and contrast up all the way). -Michael >=20 > Tom >=20 >> On Jan 4, 2024, at 11:44 AM, Michael Tremer = wrote: >>=20 >> Hello everyone, >>=20 >> (yes, yes, I am still alive=E2=80=A6) >>=20 >> I would like to pre-announce our new website which Rico and I have been wo= rking on over the last couple of months, and collect some final feedback befo= re we roll it out as soon as possible. >>=20 >> So here is an outline of what has happened and what will happen next: >>=20 >> * Rico has helped me to implement a fresh design for our website which has= been drafted by another friend. The goals were to get rid of the sad and gre= y website, which is also *way* too simplistic, and create something that is n= ice looking, memorable, and brings people in. >>=20 >> * During that journey, we have waved goodbye to Bootstrap which is hard to= work with once you have discovered Bulma (https://bulma.io/), our new CSS fr= amework of choice. We have also rewritten and refactored some parts of the ba= ckend code. There is now less Javascript and less CSS - and I am sure that we= could actually still go and save a lot more. >>=20 >> * One of the biggest rewrites is fireinfo, as with a growing number of pro= files, our PostgreSQL database started to suffer. We haven=E2=80=99t tested t= his in full production, yet, but I am sure this will be a lot faster than the= older version. This all only affects how we store the data and nothing chang= es for the clients or users. >>=20 >> * We have upgraded the PostgreSQL driver from psycopg2 to psycopg3, and we= use async programming a lot more where possible (these are all lessons learn= ed from the build service). >>=20 >> * 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 o= ur infrastructure and it is a little bit easier to just deploy one. >>=20 >> * There is a new integration with Asterisk to see current calls - previous= ly the phone stuff didn=E2=80=99t work at all any more since we replaced Free= PBX with Asterisk. >>=20 >> But that is enough about the technical stuff=E2=80=A6 Let=E2=80=99s talk a= bout what has visually changed, and why: >>=20 >> * First of all, we have brighter colours. Very bright! Because we are a fu= n project! The grey used to depress me slightly and if you ask a designer wha= t would represent us as a community, you get this. I am a lot happier with th= at. >>=20 >> * The tux is gone. This is kind of a bitter sweet moment, but the old IPFi= re =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= like this work with something modern-looking. I spent days together with pro= fessionals to draft a new logo, and we got nothing, well, apart from the simp= le things that is: IPFire_ >>=20 >> * IPFire_ is not supposed to replace the word =E2=80=9CIPFire=E2=80=9D in = texts, but I think it is a nice way to highlight the nerdiness/console people= /Linux things without becoming complex to understand, or confusing to the cor= porate people=E2=80=A6 >>=20 >> * On top of the front page, we finally have some mission statement: More T= han A Firewall. We need to talk more about what we are and what we can do, an= d we need to explain (I don=E2=80=99t know why, but we do) to people what opp= ortunities IPFire can open for them. This still needs a lot of work and I am = happy to hear any ideas what is a nice way to communicate what IPFire is to n= ew people using as few words as possible. >>=20 >> * Then, there are a couple of new pages: One of the bigger ones is the Abo= ut page that explains in more detail what IPFire does (which is why it feels = hard to repeat the same on the front page) and it has a large list of (hopefu= lly) all features that IPFire can do/supports/etc. This needs to be updated w= ith every core update, so please let me know if there is something missing in= the future as I will probably miss them. Additionally, we have a section wit= h us, the team. Being a faceless project is not very good to attract more peo= ple joining our missing, and here is now the place where people will see us f= or the first time - the people who make IPFire happen. >>=20 >> * The download page has mainly been made shorter and now includes the chan= ge log. Cloud providers have been added to an extra page. If you know of any = cloud providers that support IPFire, please let me know. Torrent downloads ar= e gone. >>=20 >> * Help: The help page has always been a hard one for me. This time it cont= ains a sentence or two that explains what all those things are good for :) Le= t=E2=80=99s see how that is going to work out=E2=80=A6 >>=20 >> * This is a big one: We are getting rid of the thousand subdomains that we= are having. There is no more wiki.ipfire.org , blog= .ipfire.org , people.ipfire.org , location.ipfire.org , and so on (except= ions do apply of course). Everything is now in one place: ipfire.org . The blog is a subsection of the website, people register accoun= ts on the main page, log in, the documentation has moved there as well. This = should hopefully make everyone happy who for a long time wanted buttons to ch= ange from one thing to the next here. Here it finally is! >>=20 >> * But there isn=E2=80=99t enough space for everything on the main navigati= on bar. So at the bottom of the page, there is an extra link called =E2=80=9C= Sitemap=E2=80=9D with all the other things that didn=E2=80=99t get a large li= nk. There is a lot of development stuff on there, too. >>=20 >> * 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 >>=20 >> * Since users might also be logged in on the main page/the blog/etc. we sh= ow =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 o= bvious what the next step of action for users is and a lot less confusing for= the people who have already done so. >>=20 >> * There has been a large list of bugs/feature requests submitted by a numb= er of people who have been fixed in this. We might have introduced a couple o= f new ones, so please file a ticket in Bugzilla if something is broken and th= at needs fixing. >>=20 >> All in all we hope that this is a big first step to make IPFire appear the= modern distribution that it is, instead of having the dark image of some cod= ers in their basements. To summarise this all in one email feels very short f= or 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. >>=20 >> We would like to ask you now for your feedback on all of this. I know that= many of you have seen this before, but please help us to double check, that = a big launch does not become an embarrassment for some tiny reason :) We have= taken some risky decisions and we are happy to see how they are turning out= =E2=80=A6 >>=20 >> The new website is currently running at https://www.michael.dev.ipfire.org= / to get to things like fireinfo, just change the subdomain like so https://f= ireinfo.michael.dev.ipfire.org/. A couple of things like editing your own pro= file 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. >>=20 >> I am exciting to hear some feedback and hopefully we can build a small roa= dmap out of it for the future! >>=20 >> Best, >> -Michael & Rico >=20 --===============1261005123923502179==--