[Neuroimaging] Nipy.org new website needs a complete remake

[Eleftherios Garyfallidis]

Hi Gael, Vanessa and Ariel,

Gael I think the previous e-mail thread was about moving the pages into
github.io and not about the design, the technology or the content of
nipy.org. This being the portal of all projects needs to communicate the
ideas better and use libraries that can be used in other projects too.
Hopefully also be as Pythonic as possible and as useful and attractive as
possible.

So, my point is that the new portal, although it has some nice ideas, for
examle it is using bootstrap which allows for better and more responsive
viewing
from different devices, it is not ready for prime time. And it shouldn't be
online with the form that is now. So, I would recommend to use the previous
website with updated links to the new github pages until this one is in a
better form.

Now about the technology used for creating the website. From my
understanding Ariel is using the default engine promoted by github which is
jekyll which at the end is using bootstrap. But bootstrap can be used with
sphinx and with pelican too which are both Python projects.

So we could actually have two better options. For the portal we can use:

a) Pelican which is an alternative of Octpress/Jekyll in Python. I used it
to make my  own website and it is easy to use for creating static websites
(like the portal). Link here http://garyfallidis.github.io and here
https://github.com/Garyfallidis/website-dev . Pelican supports both
markdown and restructuredtext.

b) It is now possible to use Sphinx with bootstrap directly. See here
https://readthedocs.org/projects/sphinx-bootstrap-theme/ and here
https://pypi.python.org/pypi/sphinx-bootstrap-theme/
The option is possibly the best solution as we could just update our
template engine (to use bootstrap) and continue using sphinx as before. But
now we can use any template we want and have a much more responsive website.

Ideally the portal should have a main theme and then the different projects
would make some alterations to this theme to create their individual image.
For example in Dipy our main colors are black and orange so we will
alternate the theme so we can use mainly those colors is our website.

Vanessa of course I am writing this e-mail because I am willing up to my
capacity to help Ariel or anyone else who wants to improve the look and
feel of the organization.

Ariel in summary, I think the portal is not well designed right now and the
content needs some more work before it is presented. I am happy to help and
I think you will find it useful to have a look in the links that I have in
this e-mail before we meet. In the meantime, I would strongly suggest to
upload the old portal until we have something more solid. I hope this is
okay.

Cheers,
Eleftherios



On Sat, Jul 25, 2015 at 4:41 AM, Gael Varoquaux <
gael.varoquaux at normalesup.org> wrote:

> On Fri, Jul 24, 2015 at 08:57:48PM -0400, Eleftherios Garyfallidis wrote:
> > It seems that nipy.org has recently changed. The previous page was much
> > better from what we have now.
>
> I agree with you that the previous page was much better in term of design
> (more colors, a more structured layout, and an image that looked like a
> brain clearly visible) and of content (clear list of main projects and
> subprojects).
>
> However, the change was advertised. I understand that you missed it: we
> all have too much mails and too many things to do.
>
> I think that you could make proposals and maybe pull requests to shape
> the website toward something that you like better. It would be great.
>
> Gaël
> _______________________________________________
> Neuroimaging mailing list
> Neuroimaging at python.org
> https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/neuroimaging
>
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