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The new openSUSE landing page

In this new page we will feature Tumbleweed and Leap.

Why did we need a new one?

Because after years working without a defined target audience and rather trying to aim at any software, internet, computer user, the openSUSE Board as invested time and knowledge understanding the real personas behind our beloved openSUSE, and while working around it they identified two "different" users: the Tumbleweed user and the openSUSE regular release user (Leap).

But why to create a new UI for it? I liked the old one.

Well, the answer is simple: just like the saying says "The shoemaker's son always goes barefoot" we were leaving our main door to new commers get old and rusty. We implemented a new UI highlighting the most important information for our new comers and of course, we wont forget any of the rest in the community like us, always contributing and working together to make openSUSE better every day.

What makes the new openSUSE landing page more Modern (or less rusty)?

Here we have to take note of a couple of new technologies implemented, but, before we go to the technical side, let's talk about the colours:

Colours:

If you are one of the openSUSE fans then we are sure you have seen the printing material Zvezdana Marjanovic has created during her more than 1 year of contribution to the community as a Graphic Designer. The new colour pallete is publicly available at: http://opensuse.github.io/branding-guidelines/

The information and order of it:

At this point we need to say Thank you! to the Board and Douglas DeMaio for helping us providing the text in the website. How we organized the Information and why

  • Tumbleweed vs Leap: The way we see it, Tumbleweed and Leap (regular release) users have the same passion but sightly different approaches with openSUSE. The first one (Tumbleweed) goes for an up-to-date tested and stable system with new rolling release versions of applications and software he/she is developing; while the second one (Leap) goes for a long-term type release and provides stability. This made us understand that new users needed to understand this differentciation in the main section of the landing page, to then decide for one or the other, and for our regular visitors the next sections will become more relevant.

  • Tools: With help of the Board we filtered out 4 of the most popular openSUSE tools: OBS, OpenQA, YaST and Kiwi. The reason for a second important position in the site is simple: our tools are in many cases, the choice maker for many openSUSE users. So we decided to give them a brief explanation (extracted from Richard Brown's blog) and present some screenshots as well as a link to see All openSUSE tools.

  • What's new: In the old landing page, unless there were a blog post about it, it was hard to find out new openSUSE tools available for everyone to try. We don't know exactly how regularly openSUSE will be launching new tools, but as soon as there is something new and exiting this will be the right place to find out more about it. Oh, and to answer the question "why in the 3rd position?" the reason is simple, it is a tool, but a new one which is still building popularity, that makes it fair enough to be following the "Tools" section.

  • New: Nothing but a Re-make of the blog's news from the old landing page. Since above it we have the section already describing something new from openSUSE, in this place, even with the same background colour in the section, we merged the general news from openSUSE.

  • Contribute: After giving information about our main distributions, our most popular tools, our new tools and news around openSUSE, our visitors will feel somewhat excited about our open source environment and this is the right time to ask and invite them to contribute with us!. So here we present them the opportunity and the information of the How to contribute.

  • Conferences: Last but not least, and if we did create some excitement in our users, we also invite you to come to meet the openSUSE community in action at one of our conferences, summits or mini-summits that we host and/or attend around the world. And why not, try the openSUSE beer :)

The technical side of the new landing page:

This is an static landing page and so, I (cynthia, who is writing this nice explanation for you) decided there is no reason to involve backend in the development. Pure front-end would be enough to take you thru the website nice and smoothly, in any device you use to browse opensuse.org, providing i18n and reading the blogs content from json.

But, what exactly did you use and why?

  • Twitter Bootstrap: I picked this front-end framework for many reasons: it's the most popular html, css and js framework in today's Internet, it is highly customizable, it is a very good friends of cross-device development, the have a well-written documentation for everyone to easily learn bootstrap, powers up the development speed, and so much more.

  • HTML5: All the new landing page includes html5 tags such: < header >, < section >, < article >, < footer >, etc. Is this a risk nowadays? Not from my point of view; few are those using browsers non-html5 compatibles, however, for those who still use old-fashion browsers, I made sure the html5 tags are still displaying as block, but of course, if you are using a browser from Mart that I didnt know about and did not test, feel free to open an issue in github and I will do my best to work to fix it.

  • Less: There are sass/scss and less lovers/fans, but im one of the less' fan. Why? First: I find it more intuitive, Secondly: I find the less documentation to be better written and that makes it easier for most people to learn it, Third and the most important: Less variables are simply overwritten once you place the new variable below in a new line, this, makes it a loooooot easier to customize bootstrap or any other framework written in less. In Sass/scss you need to import the variables of bootstrap, then your varibles, the the whole bootstrap set, then your theme and then once again your variables to overwrite (for the second time) the bootstrap variables. This, to me, makes absolutely no sense at all. Less works as just any other code where the new declaration of value of a variable overwrites the previous one and the functions using the variable take always the last value of the variable, the updated one.

  • Jquery: First of, jquery is a dependency of Bootstrap, so even if I didnt like it I would have needed to use it, but, that isn's my case. I like jquery. It saves time (although it increases the memory consumption) creating interpolations and animations in the website as well as its syntax is much more cleaner than using pure javascript.

** And some open source js libraries **

  • Particleground: An interesting effect used for the initial screen of the site creating partibles with a parallax effect. Reasons? It looks good and you can interact(play) with the dots with your mouse. More info at: https://github.com/jnicol/particleground

  • jquery-lang: This is the library (created by Irrelon Software Limited and used by many web apps, one of them, easyJet) that allows us to have a simple i81n implemented in the front-end asigning the different languages in simple Json files. More info at: https://github.com/Irrelon/jquery-lang-js

  • OWL carousel: A well written JS library that allowes us to easily create a carousel in the News section which also features Touch interactions (for tablets and phones). It has multiple uses and it is one of my favourite carousels for the wide range of ways one can implement this carousel in a website. More info at: http://owlgraphic.com/owlcarousel/

  • WOW: A very popular script in today's websites which reveals elements as they appear on the screen when the use scrolls. Simple and easy to use. It gives openSUSE landing page the last touch it needed to have a more modern look and feel. More info at: http://mynameismatthieu.com/WOW/docs.htmlope

  • jquery.easing.1.3: A simple Jquery library that extends the easing effect for the "animate" method which only includes swing and linear. In this case, it was used to give a better effect to the bouncing ball under the Contribute section which you will see if you click on any of the two options.

#CONTRIBUTE

Do you wanna contribute providing translation for the new openSUSE website?

If yes is your answer, then you will making thousands of users happy to have the openSUSE landing page in their language. All you have to do to contribute is:

  1. Fork the repository
  2. Create a new branch following this structure for the name: "New: languagename language package"
  3. Duplicate the file assets/js/langpack/es.json and name the new file with the International code of language representation of the language you will translate. If you dont know the interntional code of your language you can find at https://www.loc.gov/standards/iso639-2/php/code_list.php under ISO 639-1 Code
  4. In the new json file you have created you will see the translation first in English and its value in the new language (in this case, spanish). Proceed to remove the spanish values and apply the new translation for your language.
  5. Please make sure the file keeps the json format after you finish the translation.

** Now its time to add the new language to the dropdown. For this follow the next steps: **

  1. Inside the 'index.html' search with your text editor for 'dropdownMenu1', which is the list containing the options of languages available.
  2. Add a new option to the list by simply adding a like such <li><a href="#" class="change-language" data-language-value="es">Spanish</a></li>. Note that the data-language-value attribute contains the value of the international code of the language you added. This code has to match with the name of the file you created.
  3. Now we have added the file in the dropdown, and the last step is to include the translation file. For this, you need to open the file assets/js/opensuse-theme.js . Here you need to go to the line 208 and under it add the new language in the following format window.lang.dynamic('es', 'assets/js/langpack/es.json');. Note: We are configuring the optional languages and giving them the value with which our html will be calling them, in this case "es", and in the secong value we are declaring the rute to the file. Please verify you are giving the right values here.

** Test it ** If you want to run the website in a simple local server, you can try using Python -m SimpleHTTPServer which will run under the port 8000 locally. So simply go to http://localhost:8000/ and try changing the language of the website to the new one you just created. To make sure there is no variable without translation, open up the web inspector of your browser and check if there is any message in the console, if not, you have done an Excellent job!

Thanks to:

  • Cynthia Sanchez for developing it. Find her at: LinkedIn | Twitter
  • Zvezdana Marjanovic for designing it. Find her at: LinkedIn