Blog Theme & Design Discussion: Requests, Suggestions, Decisions

[laurburke]

Creating a new issue to log design requests, suggestions, and decisions. Please comment with new requests/suggestions or add your thoughts on the current requests/suggestions listed below.

CC: @reshamas @adrinjalali @jjerphan @ogrisel @thomasjpfan

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Production

V1: blog.scikit-learn.org

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Theme Options

Current Theme

• Minimal Mistakes

Other Themes

• Other options for Jekyll blogs: https://jekyllthemes.io/jekyll-blog-themes
• Pelican: https://blog.getpelican.com
• Hugo themes: https://themes.gohugo.io

Reference

Other Blogs

• Jupyter Blog (on Medium): https://blog.jupyter.org/archive
• Inria blog: https://scikit-learn.fondation-inria.fr/news/
• Jupyter calendar: https://docs.jupyter.org/en/latest/community/content-community.html#jupyter-community-meetings
• Data Umbrella (paid theme): https://blog.dataumbrella.org/
• Pandas Blog: https://dev.pandas.io/pandas-blog/
• Brit + Co: https://www.brit.co/

Current Design

Menus

• Header: scikit-learn.org, Calendar, Resources
  • Dropdown: Install, User Guide, API, Examples
• Sidebars
  • Social Media links
  • Archives: Category, Tag, Year
  • scikit-learn: About Us, FAQ, Code of Conduct
  • Mailing List: Subscribe, Archive
• Footer: Social Media links, Feed

Home Page

• Hero Banner: featured image, text
• Recent Posts Queue
  • Request: Display posts' featured image
  • Author, read time
• Twitter sidebar (currently hidden if viewer using adblock)

Posts

• Display authors
• Display Category, Tag

Pages

• Calendar: embedded public scikit-learn event calendar
• Resources

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Requests & Suggestions

Previous Discussions

• Issue: Add Blog to top menu bar
• Issue: Hosting on Netlify vs GH Pages

Requests

• Request: show earlier posts to viewers
  • We currently have Category, Tag and Year archives. If you have suggestions of an alternative way to display earlier posts, please comment and provide a reference link if available.
• Request: display the number of posts
  • Where should we display blog statistics?
  • Number of posts by category/tag/year? Total number?
    • The Category, Tag and Year archive pages have the number of posts.
• Request: display posts' featured image in recent/archived posts queue
• Do we want comments?
  • How would we deal with moderation?

[jnothman]

This is a great start!

Aesthetics that are a bit uncomfortable for me in Minimal Mistakes:

• Side bar clutters the view while reading. If we keep it, it could disappear when the user scrolls down.
• I find the text column width very small on a wide window
  
• I do like the homepage with images like in data umbrella.

[jjerphan]

To me, this is already a good result for a V1: thank you, @reshamas and @laurburke. 👍

A few points that can be improved:

• a few HTML elements can be fixed based on W3C validation. This is probably important for SEO.
• I find the Sans Serif font a bit hard to read.

[adrinjalali]

I agree with what's raised already, plus, it'd be nice if the right sidebar (the tweets) looked better when certain cookies are blocked by plugins. Ideally, it could say "this part is not available due to you blocking xyz".

[laurburke]

Of the themes linked above, are there any that stand out? In our last meeting, many seemed to like the theme Data Umbrella uses for their blog.

This theme costs around $50, but would definitely elevate the blog and would look "cleaner" and professional, especially compared to the current theme (Minimal Mistakes) or another free theme.

[adrinjalali]

We can use our NumFocus funds to get the theme with no delay. Once you've made a decision, if there's a need to buy the theme, can do that.

[glemaitre]

I have a preference for the Menca theme for the layout and fonts indeed. I feel that it is easier to read.

This said, I definitely let @laurburke @reshamas choose what is best on putting into production and to maintain.

[laurburke]

Thank you to everyone for your suggestions!

Based on what you've mentioned, I'm going to take a look at what is available and see if I can find a theme that combines our top requests. If I cannot identify one, we will go with the Menca theme.