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.
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.
My photo is still rotated 90 degrees in the Meet The Team section.
Regards, Adolf.
Best, -Michael & Rico