Find a new jekyll theme

LauraHilliger commented 2 years ago

Our original template was selected for ease of use, but it would appear that it is no longer fit for purpose. We need to find a new one. The community has asked for a theme that has:

more focus on images
something that can showcase inspirational quotes/videos/case studies
a greater variety of page styles (e.g., individual pages for books that look and feel different from homepage)
good code so that it continues to load quickly and work well on multiple screen sizes
findability features (e.g. analytics, SEO)

In addition, maintainers want something that is easy to maintain and update ;) We can use this ticket to try and find something to start from.

Here are all the themes.

semioticrobotic commented 2 years ago

I would also add:

open source

... just in case there happen to be templates that aren't open source for some reason. :shrug:

semioticrobotic commented 2 years ago

So far, I am liking Minimal Mistakes. A few reasons why, in no particular order of importance.

It's open source. Available under the MIT License.
It's expressly compatible with GitHub Pages. Most themes are, but I like knowing that something we choose is explicitly documented to work with the hosting platform we're using.
It's not "blog-first," as so many themes seem to be. We're not looking at a website that features blog-style content (at least not right now, and at least not primarily)
It's popular and well-documented. I've seen it in use (under various guises) before and understand it's got a strong contributor base. I can understand the documentation. I know where to go for help if we need it.
It's flexible. We should be able to theme this according to our brand guidelines and make it our own rather quickly and easily.
It features multiple page styles. This is something we've wanted for quite a while and this theme just does it straight away.
It features space for bold images. The community has been asking for a site with more images and this template lays groundwork for that look.

LauraHilliger commented 2 years ago

Looks like a big improvement! I love it, shall we create a branch so we can work in peace and then when we have somehting to show, we...show it? Or how should we get started?

semioticrobotic commented 2 years ago

Okay! Here's what I did.

Created a new project repository, new-website, to house the work. I agree that the best approach would be to work in a branch but I wanted us to be able to have a live, shared test environment so we're working with the same point of reference. Having a new repo means we can have a new GitHub Pages instance. I populated the repo with a .gitignore specifically for Jekyll work.
I cloned the new repo, downloaded the theme, extracted it, and configured it according to the documentation. I used the "Remote theme method" outlined there. So our configuration files reflect that setup. Feel free to check my work!
I fired up GitHub Pages and let it do its thing. Now if you go to http://theopenorganization.org/new-website/ you should see a blank canvas.

And that's all I was able to do for now (sorry), but I can help more later if you'd like. In the meantime, if you clone the new-website repo you should have a working copy of everything I've been able to accomplish so far. Obviously, feel free to begin working and pushing your changes straight to the repository to update the working site. I think that's the best way to stay synced up. But if you have other preference or ideas, please do share.

LauraHilliger commented 2 years ago

HIIII I was figuring loads of stuff out, and I'm committed to this template now! Nowhere close to DONE, loads of design to do, but I started to figure out the techie bits and loooookkkkk:

I was just playing around with the little headers, wanted to see what the splash images did. They hero-stretch, fyi, and I didn't want to change that, but I'm not at all married to these little headers. I still have loads to figure out on the collections and galleries feature, and I want to mess with layouts and stuff.

@semioticrobotic if you have time and are looking around and thinking "we should do X and we should do Y" maybe file tickets if you don't have tinker time? I'm excited! We're making progress!

semioticrobotic commented 2 years ago

Wow! Nice work, @LauraHilliger! Great strides.

In the days ahead I will poke around and tinker, even file some tickets!

Thank you!

open-organization / open-organization.github.io

Find a new jekyll theme #25