Jekyll Rewrite #2674

I've been working on and off for the past few months on a rewrite of the current website, made with Jekyll. It's the same technology used on the blog/AppCenter site, and being static, is very performant.

The current website looks and feels pretty good to the user. Quoting what @danrabbit said on Twitter once, it "does a good job of hiding the mess underneath". Still, I believe it is in the best interest of the project to get to the point of starting fresh eventually, and with the imminent release of Odin, it would be good timing.

Reasons to drop the current PHP-based project of the main website:

• The website mostly contains static information, with just a few dynamic bits; the PHP code results in extra overhead for both server and client;
• The code is not very organized, making it a bit difficult to maintain;
• It is unnecessarily tied with the Store;
• It has a different stack than other projects, making reutilization of elements/styles more difficult;
• Feel free to add more, this is a discussion!

Current dynamic functionalities

Now, the website has some dynamic functionalities that we'd need to pay attention to, since it'll become a static website. They are:

• Purchase - This is something we'd likely want to have an API for? I can't say I went 100% through what goes on in the current Stripe integration but it looks simple though;
• Download - It currently uses PHP to get the best region via IP, but this seems totally doable via JS. If JS is disabled, we'd have to give a default link;
• Recent blog posts - already being done via JS, no issue here;
• Team page - it currently loads the data from Slack dynamically. Could this be done on build time? I assume this doesn't change frequently
• Store - yeah, this should be a separate site and project;
• Docs - not really dynamic, but I think they could be moved to the actual docs site?

What I've already done

I have created a public repo to work on this. It is setup with a GH Action to publish it to GitHub Pages, on a subdomain I own. The live enviroment can be checked out here.

I've kept in mind the stack currently being used in other sites, and worked on making the code as clean as possible. Also, I've tried to stay true to the styles of the current website, specially regarding typography. I also kept the buttons/inputs in the same styles, but I expect them to be changed if the site is to mimic the OS's stylesheet redesign.

I've been in touch with @cassidyjames a while ago about this and, since there will likely by a redesign of the home page, haven't worked on that one at all. What's currently done and working is:

• Header
• Footer
• Language picker (working both manually or automatically by browser language)
• i18n support (currently only in English and Brazilian Portuguese)
• Dark mode support
• /support page
• /press page
• /brand page
• /oems page
• /privacy page

What I'd really like to do soon is see how to integrate this with Weblate, and see if we can salvage the existing translations from it.

What do you think?

I'm opening this discussion to see what the team thinks of the idea and what I've worked on so far. This way we can work out any issues, and hopefully if this goes forward, attract the attention of someone to help me out with this.