[LLVMdev] new website prototype

[Chris Lattner]

Hi Everyone,

A website refresh is long overdue, for a couple reasons:

1. The webpage hasn't changed substantially for years, but the project
    obviously has :)
2. The current web site is very cluttered.
3. The current site does not convey what LLVM is to new people very well.
4. The current site does not support "subprojects" at all.

As such, I put together a prototype for a new design.  Some caveats: I 
don't claim to be a web designer, I don't claim to know colors, there are 
still lots of dead/missing pieces, and I have only tested it on two 
machines, both of which run safari.  :)

That said, I committed the site to the website module in SVN.  Since it 
requires Server Side Includes to display properly, I uploaded the site to 
http://testing.nondot.org/ so you can see what it looks like.  Some of the 
nice properties of the site:

1. It is much less cluttered.
2. The site is carefully split to differentiate pages related to the
    project as a whole (which are the top-level pieces), and subprojects
    which contain actual code (e.g. llvm, llvm-gcc, test-suite, etc).
3. The site uses CSS properly, unlike the old one, allowing each
    subproject to have its own style.  For example, the top-level pages use
    one style, the llvm pages use the "classic" style:
       http://testing.nondot.org/subproj/llvm/Tools.html
4. The pages use SSI's to handle the sidebar and other repetitious parts
    of the page like the old site.  However, the new site allows pages to
    modify the sidebar to indicate which page you're on.  For example, try
    clicking on "Advocacy".  It also lets you specify a <title> for the
    page (amazing that) - the old web site fixes the title tag.
5. The pages are designed to be viewable when SSI's are disabled.  For
    example, if you check out website/AdvPubs.html and view it locally on
    your machine, it looks just like http://testing.nondot.org/AdvPubs.html
    but it lacks the sidebar.  Among other things, this means that our
    documentation can gracefully fit into the site.
6. I tried to think deep thoughts about what should be on the main page
    and how to organize the top-level pages (which are about the project as
    a whole, not about any specific subproject).  The various subproject
    pages still need a lot of work.

I'm currently putting subprojects into directories like 
/subproj/llvm-gcc, but we should probably move to having these be 
"llvm-gcc.llvm.org" or something at some point.

At this point, I'm interested in feedback and help.  I've only tried the 
page with one browser, so it's entirely possible it looks like a monkey's 
armpit on other popular browsers.  There is still a ton of missing content 
that needs to be filled in.  The site also currently just includes copies 
of various pieces of documentation.  These files will eventually live in 
their respective subproject modules and be svn imported (or something 
similar) on the live site.  In addition, I'm "color challenged" and did I 
mention that I'm not a web designer? :)

Any help would be appreciated.  For the record, I'm not tied to any one 
specific color scheme or site design, but I'd like to see this start 
moving forward.  Is anyone interested in contributing?

-Chris

-- 
http://nondot.org/sabre/
http://llvm.org/