On 8 Jan 2024, at 13:17, Adolf Belka adolf.belka@ipfire.org wrote:
Hi Michael & Rico,
On 06/01/2024 15:08, Michael Tremer wrote:
Hello Adolf,
On 5 Jan 2024, at 14:43, Adolf Belka adolf.belka@ipfire.org wrote:
Hi Michael,
On 04/01/2024 17:44, Michael Tremer wrote:
Hello everyone,
(yes, yes, I am still alive…)
I would like to pre-announce our new website which Rico and I have been working 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 been drafted by another friend. The goals were to get rid of the sad and grey website, 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 work with once you have discovered Bulma (https://bulma.io/), our new CSS framework of choice. We have also rewritten and refactored some parts of the backend code. There is now less Javascript and less CSS - and I am sure that we could actually still go and save a lot more.
One of the biggest rewrites is fireinfo, as with a growing number of profiles, our PostgreSQL database started to suffer. We haven’t tested this 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 changes for the clients or users.
We have upgraded the PostgreSQL driver from psycopg2 to psycopg3, and we use 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’t do its job well, but rather because of the reason that we have both in our infrastructure 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’t work at all any more since we replaced FreePBX with Asterisk.
But that is enough about the technical stuff… Let’s talk about what has visually changed, and why:
First of all, we have brighter colours. Very bright! Because we are a fun project! The grey used to depress me slightly and if you ask a designer what would 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 “logo” 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 professionals 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 “IPFire” 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 corporate people…
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 we need to explain (I don’t know why, but we do) to people what opportunities 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 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 hard 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 the future as I will probably miss them. Additionally, we have a section with us, 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 cloud providers that support IPFire, please let me know. Torrent downloads are gone.
Help: The help page has always been a hard one for me. This time it contains a sentence or two that explains what all those things are good for :) Let’s see how that is going to work out…
This is a big one: We are getting rid of the thousand subdomains that we are having. There is no more wiki.ipfire.org http://wiki.ipfire.org/, blog.ipfire.org http://blog.ipfire.org/, people.ipfire.org http://people.ipfire.org/, location.ipfire.org http://location.ipfire.org/, and so on (exceptions do apply of course). Everything is now in one place: ipfire.org http://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 should hopefully make everyone happy who for a long time wanted buttons to change from one thing to the next here. Here it finally is!
But there isn’t enough space for everything on the main navigation bar. So at the bottom of the page, there is an extra link called “Sitemap” with all the other things that didn’t 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…
Since users might also be logged in on the main page/the blog/etc. we show “join us now” and “subscribe to our newsletter” only when people have not already done so, which makes it a lot more obvious what the next step of action for users is and a lot less confusing for the 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 new 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 modern 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 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…
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://fireinfo.michael.dev.ipfire.org/. A couple of things like editing your own profile won’t work because the development instance can’t 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 roadmap out of it for the future!
Some relatively minor feedback.
That is probably very good at this point :)
In the section labelled Under The Hood,
It mentions the ciphers Blowfish, DES/3DES and CAST5. As these are so insecure, and hopefully in the near future will disappear, I don't think we should have them as a focus point.
Similar thing with LZO Compression. The function was insecure so since OpenVPN2.5 the option no longer does any compression on the server, even if the LZO Compression checkbox is checked. So I think best to not mention it in this page.
I did stop a moment when I wrote it down initially, but then decided to include it, because we actually do support this. And I thought that the page should simply have an almost complete list of all features that IPFire supports. Thoughts I had before were to add a little (Deprecated) tag, but that makes the page too long and complicated. It will also become a nightmare to keep up to date. I could settle on something like a star though. > The preferred option would be that these bullet points become links to the wiki pages and there we have a lot of space to explain. Would that work for you, too?
I think a star against them is fine. It highlights them in a way and the details can be found in the wiki as the ciphers are mentioned there as being insecure.
For the LZO Compression, I have planned to go and update the wiki on that point so it makes it clear that no one is actually getting any compression if it is checked, just the compression headers added.
If links to the wiki can be made then that would work very well.
My photo is still rotated 90 degrees in the Meet The Team section.
Yes, I noticed. Did you try to upload it again or did this happen when I tried to upload it?
It has been fixed now. Last check my head was the right way round :-)
Other people have mentioned the red colour as being a bit too harsh/bright.
I never noticed that in my case.
Thank you for this feedback. I think the colour is not really the problem.
I have my screen on full brightness all of the time; right now it is dark and I only have a small light on my desk; and if I open the login page in fullscreen mode on my 27” screen, I cannot under any circumstance call this a burning colour. It is a fun colour, but it does not in any way hurt my eyes. And I think that can only be because of the screen which represents a different colour to me than to other people.
Today I checked this out on my laptop with a 15" screen and on my desktop with a 32" screen. I personally do not have a problem with the colour effect. I have tried switching between the Home and the About pages but it did not feel too bright to me at all.
The About page is a lot brighter because it has a white background. So it can only be down to some software in GPUs or screens that make certain colours more vivid.
If it is going to be toned down, then it should stay the same colour but reduce the brightness and not by too much.
One thing I noticed today when going through the website was that while the AWS site is showing the latest Core Update 182 as being an available image, on the Exoscale site it has the available version as Core Update 149.
Exoscale does not have a process to update the image, and they tend to not react to emails.
I will put this on my list so that they update the image.
Is that Exoscale or us that has to keep that image version up to date?
Well, it would be nice if they would do it… but you know how these companies work...
This is nothing to do with the new website but it just seemed peculiar when I noticed it so I thought I would mention it.
-Michael
Regards, Adolf.
-Michael
Regards, Adolf.
Best, -Michael & Rico
-- Sent from my laptop
-- Sent from my laptop