A Website that Fits: introducing æternity’s new website

News and Announcements
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æternity’s protocol, codes, aepps, and the supporting community around it has evolved very rapidly and it’s only appropriate that the website be updated to reflect how far the ecosystem has come. This is an enormous challenge—considering the fact that perhaps no website could ever really fully embody the monumental leaps the æternity ecosystem has made within such a short period of time.

To further facilitate the expansion of the ecosystem, the website is being revamped to deliver an easier, more structured resource hub for both old-timers and newcomers. We are streamlining the website so that developers, miners, node operators, tech and community builders will be able to get involved with æternity faster.

We are initially rolling out the dev pages and are working on the other pages in parallel. As it is with a decentralized community, everyone is encouraged to check out the new website and leave comment—tell us what can be done better, where you’re having problems, as well as any suggestions to help guide the team through the process of building a website that fits.

Here is the link to the new website: www.aeternity.com

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The current launch is the first step towards making aeternity.com the home of the
æcosystem. aeternity.com will also link to the most important websites and projects across the ecosystem such as:

As the aecosystem grows, more links will be added to this directory. As we’ve seen throughout the years, community members have a tendency to become partners in the growth of the community.

Let’s build this together. :heart:
Leave your comments below, and thank you for your feedback!

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The new website is hosted and available on GitHub.

Anyone can contribute by making a pull request. If you don’t know how to do a pull request, you can also write your feedback here. We will also post a “how to contribute” guide here soon too.

We will soon explain how to translate the page and are currently working on a Chinese and Spanish translation.

Any feedback is highly appreciated!

Edit: please clear your browser cash if you have problems seeing the new page

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Congrats! Invites to browse, information is well presented for fast orientation.

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Looks great! I love the developer first approach and thank you for featuring dacade : )

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Hi,

If you’d like to contribute, please open an issue (or a PR) in GitHub - aeternity/web-dev: Website source of aeternity.com

Some instructions for contributors:

The programming stack is chosen to simplify contribution. Thus we picked vuepress (https://vuepress.vuejs.org) for a backbone of the site. It allows the main content to be written in Markdown.

The entry point (index) of the site is served from index.md (or README.md) which is compiled to html/js on deployment. Any other .md in the root folder will be compiled as html and will be accessible for linking by name (without .md). You can read the official vuepress docs for details.

To run the site locally for development, you will need NodeJS (>=8) and yarn (or npm). Then from within the project directory you will need to run yarn install (or npm install) to fetch the dependencies.

For continuous development you have to use:

 yarn dev

(or npm run dev)

It will run a local http server on port 8080. Then you can access the site from http://localhost:8080

You can also configure a base path from the environment

export BASE_PATH=/web-dev/
yarn dev

Now the site will be served from http://localhost:8080/web-dev/
Note: make sure it includes both the leading and trailing slashes

Unfortunately you will have to stop (^C) and restart the server to see any changes.

To compile a static build (distribution) you must run:

yarn build

(or npm run build) within the project directory. The resulting distribution will be generated in the .vupress/dist sub-directory which is ready for deployment (please, do not commit it in PR’s).

Theme (assets and stylesheets) are located in .vuepress/theme. Few very simple vuejs components are included in .vuepress/components.

Before editing the texts please, check the contents of index.md to see how it is structured (e.g. the empty lines are important).

The most used component would be <Section id=".." type="..."> which creates a visual block (section) of text with a specific design (i.e. normal, alt, fancy, hero) and an unique html id. There should be an empty line after the opening tags and before the closing tags. No indentations.

Within the Section there are named “slots” that you could use. It is basically a <div> with a class. Name should be unique within the the section scope. Specifying content for a slot is typical for vuejs:

::: slot slot-name

Some markdown

:::

Basically content within these slots appears differently within the Section. The availability and names are subject to change, you can check the Section component for them (currently header and default). Any other slots will be added dynamically after the main content. Some of them are already styled (check index.md and the stylesheets). Slots can not be nested.

Note: You have to put empty lines after the opening ::: slot ... and before the closing ::: (without any leading spaces).

Important: Paths to images should be relative to the current file within the folder structure, the real paths will be auto-resolved on compilation, any absolute paths will not be properly resolved. So images in index.md should be ./img/ (do not use /img/ or img/)

I guess rest you could figure out by inspecting the code. If you have any questions, please ask in the forum or open an issue.

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happy to finally see the new website and I really like it :blush::+1:t2:

the only thing I do not like hasn’t mich to do with the website itself:

  • please remove all references to the documentation hub as long it is in the current state

I would prefer pointing directly to certain sources like the tutorials or sth. else on github.

In my opinion the documentation hub in the current state is only confusing people instead of helping them to find what they search for. I would go further and say: take it down :sweat_smile:

anyway really really happy to see the new website! :sunglasses::metal:t2:

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It was just updated with the protocol first, more updates following the next few days! If you have feedback to the structure of the doc-hub, please share your thoughts. A big plus of it is the full-text search (i’m using it a lot to find things).

The next iteration of the doc-hub will focus on all /doc/ repositories from the main products

  • Protocol
  • SDKs
  • Middleware
  • AEproject
  • Components

@pegah.chain is currently working on it, she will see this post for sure…

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Yes! I’m working on it currently and the whole protocol repository just got updated today! :slight_smile: I’m currently mirroring every repository one to one as it is on GitHub. More updates are following asap! Over here you can see what has been added: reconstuctured and added all missing files of the whole protocol repo… · aeternity/documentation-hub@f28dafe · GitHub :tada:

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Small feedback from mobile browsing. Overall it’s great. I like the improved messaging for example oracles are now described as interoperable. But, there is a gap (blank space) under The ‘æternity Protocol is’ section, see screenshot. I see the size of gap varies if the arrows are used to see other sub pages, which is cool but if possible I think the gap should go

Mobile screenshot

Screenshot_20200128-134712
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End screenshot

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:hugs::hugs::hugs::hugs::hugs::hugs::hugs::hugs::hugs::hugs::hugs::hugs::hugs::hugs::hugs::hugs::hugs::hugs::hugs:full of high hopes

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thanks. I support removal of all links to stuff which does not work, like the dochub, as you stated.

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Yes, i already created an issue on this on GitHub, you are also invited to create issues for anything you spot.

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The documentation hub just got updated with the newest docs.

I’d especially like to highlight the protocol section for everyone who wants to get to know the protocol better http://aeternity.com/documentation-hub/protocol/

You can visit it here Redirecting to awesome-aeternity it also supports a full text search. The main thing that will slightly change over the next days is the navigation on the left to make it more intuitive to browse.

On GitHub there are more than 180 repositories right now. The repository of the doc hub is public too, in the same way like with the website you can do pull request or open an issue if you have feedback.

@marco.chain we will also add the docs of the Java SDK which you maintain. In a later stage it would be great if the community helps to keep everything up to date and point out blank spots. At the SDKs we link directly to the doc repos right now via the website already.

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For the moment I think it’s fine to have all mirrored docs updated in the documentation hub.

I think I already mentioned some time in the past that it’s necessary to rethink the way we want to provide a new dev focused entrypoint regarding documentation.

It’s probably not the best way to always mirror/copy docs of all projects in one central place.

I appreciate our docs being included somehow. Currently its unfortunately not up to date.

I think there are 2 options:

  • each project maintains the docs itself and we have a global entrypoint (Website) which points to the respective docs/repos
  • all projects contribute to one documentation and point to the „central“ documentation within the respective repository

I don’t like the mirroring approach as long as it cannot be automated.

I am curious about other opinions. I guess we all have one goal -> make the onboarding of new developers and users as smooth as possible :blush:

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I have done a lot of research and as long as the aeternity ecosystem is as small as it is today, I believe we should put as much effort as possible in making the on-boarding for developers as smooth as possible. An idea on how to archive this is

  1. Create a developer focused landing page and dedicated product websites
  2. Structure and maintain all reference documentation in one hub
  3. Build a “Developer Learning Materials” section with tutorials and guides with an introduction to the basics of the aeternity stack.

We need to create a funnel for developers for getting started with aeternity. I personally like how NEAR structured their doc-hub here https://docs.nearprotocol.com/ and Im currently working on a concept/plan for aeternity. It is still very much work in progress but I will share the current status quo with you in a PM and your feedback is more than appreciated!

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Thank you very much for the feedback, everyone. We are taking note of your comments and working on fixes. In the meantime, keep them coming! :vulcan_salute:t3::alien:

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just showed the page to my colleagues and I provided the link using http instead of https. directly got the question why no https xD

@dincho.chain can you configure it to enforce https?

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