crates.io pre-planning: website redesign

[ishitatsuyuki]

The content is initially summarized from the meeting, and eventually expanded with replies on this thread.

The redesign is proposed as a full rewrite while moving away from Ember.

Motivation

• Both technical and UX issues with the current frontend
• Aligning the look with the new Rust branding
• Moving away from Ember to have less issues with (outdated) dependencies

Potential blockers

• lack of people (in particular, a designer)
• no team consensus on doing this immediately
  • PoCs are welcome

Migration methods

One gigantic PR is not viable

• Migrating pages one-by-one
  With the implementation of ember fastboot
• Run a beta frontend side-by-side

[carols10cents]

Current update from my point of view:

• We still don't have the people necessary to do this:

  • A designer (volunteer or funds to hire a designer)
  • People to manage community involvement of the design process
  • People to implement the design
  • Maintainers with time to review the code
  • People to test the new implementation

• I'm not convinced it's worth transitioning away from ember without a redesign, or doing a redesign without transitioning away from ember, given that we eventually want both. They'll both require about the same amount of maintainer review and testing, so that just doubles the amount of effort needed, and we still don't have enough effort available. I'm open to hearing ways to mitigate this concern.

EDIT: There was a POC of server-side rendering and I enumerated my concerns in Dec 2017 here; many of those issues are still problems today.

[kzys]

Is that something we are going to do in 2020? I'm not a big Ember fan, but not happy if we are going to throw away what we are doing (e.g. #1811 and/or #1795) soon-ish.

[carols10cents]

My concerns from June 2019 and Dec 2017 are things that are still concerning to me, and I do want to give Fastboot a really good try. So no, I don't see this happening in 2020 and I don't think your work will go to waste ❤️ Thank you so much for your help!