New Twisted Site Preparing for Release

[oubiwann]

Jonathan Lange, Huw Wilkins, and myself (Duncan McGreggor) are in the process of preparing a new twisted trac site for release (new design by Huw). We would like for people in the community to take a look, try it out, and log issues encountered here in this tracker item.

The development version of the site can be visited here:

>>> 'uggc://furyy4.nqlghz.hf/genp/gjvfgrq'.decode('rot13')

It would make all of our lives easier if the URL for the development/testing site did not make it into Google's all-encompassing craw, so please refrain from entering host information -- just provide URLs relative to the trac instance (/trac/twisted).

[oubiwann]

Current issues:

• CSS tune-up of main nav
• Deepen green colors from "snake skin" to "magical forest with grues"
• Prepend the word "Building" to the tagline
• Download image on front page needs CSS adjustments (fixed pixel width)
• Lots and lots of testing

[moonfallen]

Really great first impression. I love the CD widget and the top navigation, those are very pretty. They make the whole page more accessible. A few points, mostly minor:

- "internet" should be "Internet" in the logo

- the "reflected" logo looks wrong somehow. It doesn't look realistic enough or abstract enough. If I can figure out how to put my finger on it I'll comment again later.

- Although I like the "snake skin" green, the color is wrong for the heading text in the body of the page. There's not enough contrast between the green headings and the white background. I think you need to fiddle with the HSV, as the kids say.

- Edit and Attach buttons at the bottom are flush to the left edge, looks icky. Other stuff (I just clicked on "ROADMAP", for example) are also flush against the edge.

- Jumping into the FAQ page or the core developer guide used to be no big deal, it was white like the rest of the site. Now, it's jarring and distracting how plain they are compared to the front page. Tendency is to think you got an error page somehow, just because it's so different. Can the stylesheets for those be updated to follow the front page design?

[oubiwann]

Fixed the main nav/hover border issue.

[oubiwann]

Huw has:

• Updated the tag line in the logo
• Fixed the CSS for button position, as moonfallen had pointed out was a problem
• Numerous other CSS changes

[oubiwann]

huwshimi wrote:

I was poking around the Twisted site and was thinking we should transfer the style sheets over to the documentation pages as well. It wouldn't be hard and would help to keep the uniformity.

[radix]

It looks good. What's the plan for deploying this? Are we going to be moving the Trac configuration / template stuff into an SVN repository?

Also ISTR people bringing up issues about the growability of that download box on the right. Has that been resolved?

About the documentation: I totally agree. The template for the developer guide documentation is in the main Twisted repository at doc/core/howto/template.tpl, IIRC.

[oubiwann]

Replying to radix:

It looks good. What's the plan for deploying this?

No clue. I would imagine we need to ask JP about this.

Are we going to be moving the Trac configuration / template stuff into an SVN repository?

Sounds good. I can put the code in a new "trac" dir under WebSite/trunk/ if folks approve.

About the documentation: I totally agree. The template for the developer guide documentation is in the main Twisted repository at doc/core/howto/template.tpl, IIRC.

Yeah, template.tpl references stylesheet.css.

[exarkun]

Getting this stuff into subversion is definitely desirable. Are there changes outside of the templates/ directory?

Deployment should just be a matter of checking out the right WebSite directory, I hope.

[moonfallen]

Improvements look great. The reflection looks a little better. (Still needs a capital I, though.)

I don't notice any problems with the size of the download box. I tried the following:

- CTRL+PLUS to grow the font size. The box embiggens vertically, which does a good job of retaining real estate for the rest of the page, no problem here.

- Shrink the page horizontally. Box stays against the right edge of the page. The rest of the text shrinks around it. That seems right also.

[oubiwann]

Replying to exarkun:

Getting this stuff into subversion is definitely desirable. Are there changes outside of the templates/ directory?

Yes: trac/htdocs (images and css)

Deployment should just be a matter of checking out the right WebSite directory, I hope.

Then perhaps we want to add all of the trac directory? (conf, htdocs, plugins, templates, etc.)

[exarkun]

I'd rather not have unversioned files in a checkout of an subversion directory.

Maybe we should do something with symlinks.

[glyph]

Taking a look again:

• Code syntax highlighting has been turned off. I added some code snippets to comments on ticket 1. I hope this isn't intentional :).
• I think that having the text input areas be the dark grey is questionable. They look out of place against the white background.
• The heading text is still too light. I'm OK with not messing with the green in the images to roll this out, but the headings really have to change to something higher contrast (darker).

Overall, very nice. Can't wait until this is deployed.

[radix]

1. I'm pretty sure the syntax highlighting stuff is a trac configuration issue, not a styling issue, and their test deployment of trac probably just hasn't enabled it. Shouldn't be an issue when it's deployed.

2. Definitely agree about most of the text input areas being black. It appears this decision was based on making the search input black, so it matches the header. Can't that be done with an id-matching style?

3. It took me a while to figure out which heading text you were talking about. I agree about the <h?> tags' coloring; it should be darker, and in fact, that would still match with the green in the header, as it is mostly much darker green than the heading text currently is.

[oubiwann]

I got the .svg source file from Huw tonight, so this weekend I will be darkening the greens in the graphics and updating the CSS headers to match.

I will also add the code to a subdir of WebSite in svn.

[oubiwann]

I have added the trac directories htdocs and templates to WebSite/trunk under the new directory trac-files. I have also included a brief README. The initial file addition was a set of pristine files from trac. The next commit included the changes that Huw and I have made.

The dev site seems to be running well from svn.

[oubiwann]

Huw and I are working on darking in the colors for the graphical elements as requested by glyph (IRC converstion). While that work is underway, glyph indicated he would like to push the new site out as soon as possible, and we could update the site with finer-tuned images at a later date.

In that interest, I've darkened up the h* tags, as requested.

Additionally, Huw has updated the CSS for the forms so that it's more legible (no more white on black text).

[wsanchez]

Wow, this is much cleaner. Kudos!

[oubiwann]

So, um... this has been ready to go for over a week now. I guess I should have posted that then. I'll set it to "review" and assign it to, oh... say, JP?

[exarkun]

I'll try to get to this as soon as I can.

A question, though. How much customization has gone into the .cs files that were checked in? The trac folks seem to be trying to phase out clearsilver.

[oubiwann]

Well, I never really liked CS that much, so that's cool. But I just took a look at Genshi, and as with so many templating tools, it looks like freaking PHP.

Regardless, Edgewall says they'll be providing (some) support for CS.

To actually answer your question, though, the tweaks to the CS templates are fairly minor and would be no problem at all to do again in trac with Genshi.

[exarkun]

Replying to oubiwann:

Well, I never really liked CS that much, so that's cool. But I just took a look at Genshi, and as with so many templating tools, it looks like freaking PHP.

Haven't used either much. I kind of assumed they were both somewhat crappy though :)

Regardless, Edgewall says they'll be providing (some) support for CS.

It seems like a particular system can use either CS or Genshi, as determined by what the Python for that system looks like. The core components in trac itself seem to have switched over to Genshi already, so it seems like we'll have to switch. For stability reasons, we're running a fairly recent revision of trunk (the reason I asked is that I went to update this to try to get some more fixes and noticed all the built-in .cs files disappear :/)

To actually answer your question, though, the tweaks to the CS templates are fairly minor and would be no problem at all to do again in trac with Genshi.

This is good to hear, at least. Sorry that we may need to do this sooner rather than later. I haven't updated to the Genshi-requiring version of trac yet, but I probably should by tomorrow or the next day (not that this implies any deadline for the templates to be updated, but it does seem to imply they'll need to be updated before the initial deployment).

Any thoughts on maintenance of these things? Having a complete copy of all the templates seems like a disaster from the perspective of tracking upstream changes. I'll probably harass some trac developers with this question, too.

[oubiwann]

Replying to exarkun:

To actually answer your question, though, the tweaks to the CS templates are fairly minor and would be no problem at all to do again in trac with Genshi.

This is good to hear, at least. Sorry that we may need to do this sooner rather than later. I haven't updated to the Genshi-requiring version of trac yet, but I probably should by tomorrow or the next day (not that this implies any deadline for the templates to be updated, but it does seem to imply they'll need to be updated before the initial deployment).

"Damn those meddling kids! We would have gotten away with it, if..."

Yeah, so I guess there's no alternative but a new test install. I'll set this up on the same server, migrate the templates, etc.

I'll take ownership back of this ticket, and reasign for review once this has been done and tested.

Any thoughts on maintenance of these things? Having a complete copy of all the templates seems like a disaster from the perspective of tracking upstream changes. I'll probably harass some trac developers with this question, too.

Good call about the upstream changes. I haven't messed with it at all, but it is my understanding (which is very limited) that any template not found in the trac instance directory (e.g., /var/www/trac/twisted/templates) would be searched for in the common shared directory (e.g., /usr/share/trac/templates.

[oubiwann]

I've upgraded to .10 (non-beta) on the dev site and noticed the following:

• .10 still comes with the ClearSilver templates
• I could find no reference to Genshi in the source tarball
• the site continues to work just fine with no changes

Ah, double-checking the trac site, it's version 0.11 that will have Genshi. I suggest we deal with the template changes once we consider upgrading to 0.11.

The latest version (0.10) was released a little over a month ago. We don't anticipate migrating to something that trac hasn't released and is still in dev, do we?

Assuming that the answer to that last question is "no", I will put this ticket back into "review"...

[exarkun]

Unfortunately, we're running 0.11dev, ie trunk@4045 (well, not quite, actually that revision with a couple other revisions merged out at the moment). I don't want to be doing this, but various deadlock and segfault bugs have been fixed since 0.10. Without those the server dies daily (instead of semi-daily). Basically the only way I have found to get the trac developers to be responsive to bug reports is to run trunk@HEAD and file a bug every single time the system goes down.

So that's the scoop...

[oubiwann]

Ohhhh, got it.

I've installed 0.11 from trunk on the dev box, but it's barfing on the upgrade.

More later.

[exarkun]

Would it be helpful to get a new copy of the trac database?

[oubiwann]

Dunno what the problem was, but it seems to have "cleared up" (i.e., I must have been doing something wrong).

The dev site is running on trac 0.11dev, and I've seen no issues so far. Porting to Genshi was relatively painless. At least working with Genshi is less painful than ClearSilver.

I will commit the changes tonight.

[oubiwann]

JP, this has been ready to go (using Genshi) since mid-Nov...

What else do you need from me for this to go live?

[exarkun]

Where are the files? I see trac-files in WebSite trunk, but it still looks like ClearSilver to me. I'm sure I'm just missing something obvious.

[oubiwann]

The ClearSilver stuff is still in there, but there should be a new Genshi file in there called layout.html that was added in (r935 of the WebSite trunk).

[exarkun]

Okay, I see it now. I'm having trouble getting it up, though. I moved the old htdocs and templates directory in the twisted trac project directory aside and created symlinks in their place which point to those directories in a WebSite checkout. Very little about the site changed, though. The new links (HOME, FAQ, etc) showed up at the top, but roughly all of the rest of the site remained the same. Did I miss something?

[oubiwann]

Sounds like you missed htdocs/css? That's where all the guts of the look and feel are...

There's also a chunk of HTML that needs to be pasted into the wiki page at the top:

{{{
#!html
<!-- Begin side bar //-->
<div id="side_bar">

  <div id="download_top">
  &nbsp;
  </div>
  <div id="download">
    <a class="ext-link" href="http://tmrc.mit.edu/mirror/twisted/Twisted/2.4/Twisted-2.4.0.tar.bz2">Twisted 2.4.0 tarball</a><br />
    <a class="ext-link" href="http://tmrc.mit.edu/mirror/twisted/Twisted/2.4/Twisted_NoDocs-2.4.0.win32-py2.3.exe">Twisted 2.4 Win32 installer for Python 2.3</a><br />
    <a class="ext-link" href="http://tmrc.mit.edu/mirror/twisted/Twisted/2.4/Twisted_NoDocs-2.4.0.win32-py2.4.exe">Twisted 2.4 Win32 installer for Python 2.4</a><br />
  </div>
  <div id="download_bottom">
  &nbsp;
  </div>


  <div id="donate">
    <h3>Contributing</h3>

    <p>Want to help Twisted, but don't have any spare time? If you appreciate Twisted and want to help the community and future development, consider a monetary donation. This is not tax deductable. Donations will be used mostly towards payment of hosting costs.
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<!-- End side bar //-->
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}}}

[exarkun]

Okay. This was a trac problem. I think the site is updated now.

[exarkun]

Things seem to be going okay, and things look pretty good overall. :) A couple issues I've noticed:

• The reply links above each comment are white on white
• The logged in as ... is black on dark grey
• The site search field is white on light blue

I also made a few changes to things myself:

• Commented out the download link in layout.html, because we don't have that page. :( Someone can re-enable it trivially once the page exists.
• Removed various boilerplate from the page footer
• Added the sitemeter boilerplate to the page footer
• Fix various misc links since the real server is rooted at /trac/ instead of /trac/twisted/.

I committed all my changes to the repository. Let me know if you notice anything that might be a deployment error, and then I think we can resolve this ticket (and make some new easier ones for the issues I mentioned above).

[oubiwann]

Looks good. I'm all for resolving this ticket and opening individual ones to address specific issues.

As for the download link, it should be "Downloads" instead of what it was on the experimental site ("TwistedDownloads").

[oubiwann]

I've created tickets for the issues you mentioned. I'll close this puppy now.