Re: [Tails-dev] Improving ikiwiki upstream [was: CSS fixes]

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Author: u
Date:  
To: tails-dev
New-Topics: Re: [Tails-dev] Improving ikiwiki upstream [was: CSS fixes]
Subject: Re: [Tails-dev] Improving ikiwiki upstream [was: CSS fixes]
Hi!

sajolida:
> intrigeri:
>> sajolida:
>>> CSS is notoriously painful to work with in the project because nobody
>>> likes it, our CSS are super messy, ikiwiki is crap in this regard, etc.
>>
>> Taking a step back.


>> I'd be happy to help translate "ikiwiki is crap in this regard" into
>> actionable bug reports, but I can't do it alone.
>
> I admit that I'm very bad at reporting bugs to ikiwiki but in my
> imaginary at least, ikiwiki is not a very active upstream project
> either. So I thought that the bugs that I might fill would just rot
> there forever.


Same here.

> Now:
>
> - Improving our website in general, like reporting and fixing bugs in
> ikiwiki is nowhere in our core budget so it would have to be volunteer
> time, and at least to me, not at all exciting time. Maybe that's a
> problem in our core budget but right now changes happen on the website
> mostly through technical writing (which is about content), ideally
> through UX (tiny tiny bits), as side effect of other work
> (installation assistant, donation campaign, etc.). But right now
> nobody is really responsible for this work I think.
>
> - The limitations I suffer the most from in ikiwiki seem, at first
> sight, too deep to deserve a bug report. The "templating" system
> extremely primitive and my suggestion would be to replacing
> completely, it has no CSS framework, it's not designed for content
> reuse, etc. But I trust you intrigeri to help me frame this as
> more pragmatic fixes that can happen before the year 2525.


What my problems with ikiwiki were while working on the donation campaign:

- make it easy to add parameters to URLs when building links, i.e.
[[linktext|path/to/link]] should be able to also build links that
resemble [[linktext|path/to/link?param=something]] and let's go crazy:
[[linktext|path/to/link?param=something&somethingelse]]

- the template language can only check for boolean variables while it
should be possible to check for a value, i.e. @if var == (string)
value@. Currently ikiwiki can only either print variables or check if
they are set or not. This is the part I found extremely limiting.

- I want to be able to include template parts, or to be more precise,
.mdwn files, within page.tmpl based on some if statement. These template
parts should be translateable.

> What's the next step here and who will do it? Call for a voice meeting
> with intrigeri, u, and me? Take a few hours during a sprint to talk
> about this? I'm at least not ready to take long hours to write emails
> about this and would need synchronous communication.


I can create bug reports out of these three things I guess.
No need for a meeting from my POV.

Cheers!
u.