[Nix-dev] New website

[Wout Mertens]

Hi Eelco!

On Mon, Jun 2, 2014 at 3:58 PM, Eelco Dolstra <eelco.dolstra at logicblox.com>
wrote:

> On 01/06/14 09:58, Wout Mertens wrote:
>
> >   * Nixpkgs should be more visible
>
> Actually, a major goal in the redesign was to *get rid* of all the
> non-NixOS
> stuff. It's the NixOS homepage, after all, not the Nixpkgs homepage.
> Confronting
> visitors with a lot of other projects is just confusing.
>

Ok, I get that... but on the other hand Nixpkgs is a *major* thing. I can
see it supplanting Homebrew on the Mac once it has more packages, and it
allows deploying newer versions of services on older distributions, safely.
I agree that Nix is not that interesting to end-users.

Likewise, NixOps is very interesting but probably only to a small subset of
potential NixOS users.

So how about making the discover/download section of the homepage more
visually separate from the news section, and splitting it vertically:

 ________________________________________________________________________________
|        NixOS is Awesome!               |     NixPkgs installs anywhere!
     |
| * declarative * instant rollback * ... | * Debian * RedHat * Suse * OS X
* ... |
|         [Download] [Learn More]        |(6500 pkgs) [Download] [Learn
More]    |
 --------------------------------------------------------------------------------

News                                                               Blogs

News
 -------------
News                                                              Twitter
News
 -------------
News                                                              Commits

It would be nice to have a "Packages" link in the navbar though, like on
> archlinux.org, linking to a easily browseable list of available packages.
> Also,
> the front page could have a blurb about the number of packages available in
> NixOS, which could link to Nixpkgs.
>

Yes a package list would be great. How do you count the packages btw?
nix-env lists 24k :)


> >   * The front page is serving new visitors and active users, it should
> pick one.
>
> I considered removing all the news from the homepage, but 1) it seems
> useful to
> show activity on the homepage, just to convey that the project is alive; 2)
> visitors don't have to read it, it's easy to mentally filter it, so I felt
> it
> doesn't hurt much to have it there.
>

Yeah... although right now I think it is visually too much like the "learn
about nixos" part, and a layout with more spacing and clear sectioning
would help.

Wout.
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