Fedora Websites and Apps Team – What have we been up to?

I’m back to share the progress our team has been making in our efforts to revamp the Fedora websites. Over the last few months, the team has gone beyond maintaining the websites in their current states. This increase in activity has led to the following positive changes in both the in-development websites and the team ecosystem.

Recent accomplishments

• The team actively works with the folks from the Design, Infrastructure, and Marketing teams to develop and evaluate the websites. We shared the website mockups created by the folks from the Design team with the wider community on Fedora Discussion. The feedback provided on them is accounted for.
• As the websites are now again being developed from the ground up, the team has the opportunity to explore new technologies and engineering workflows. As a result, we have decided to render a static site using NuxtJS and related libraries for building our websites and Penpot for designing the user interface mockups for our websites.
• The team has inspired folks by their presence at Fedora Linux Release Parties, Fedora Hatch Pune India, Nest With Fedora etc. and with our Discussion posts, which led in turn to a significant influx of contributors within the team. Once again, I would like to thank the folks who took the time to join and contribute to the team.
• With the work on the new websites progressing on our GitLab subgroup, the team has organized/participated in multiple community activities such as CMS (or content management system) usability evaluation, workshops for frontend design, Affinity Mapping for discussing the issues and epics and much more.
• The team now has two weekly meetings to provide enough attention to both updates and technically involved discussions. The former is a 30-minute meeting every Tuesday. The latter is a 90-minute meeting every Wednesday in our virtual conference room.

What’s next

This is just the tip of the iceberg of all the good things that the team is amounting. But we still want to know how we can make things even better. Please take a few minutes to fill out a short survey. Note that the survey is open for two weeks from today. As we are on the final stretch of the Websites and Apps Revamp Fedora Council objective, I would really like to ensure that we improve. I’d like to set up a roadmap for the times to come after the objective is completed. By joining our chat channel, you can help contribute to the design/development of our new websites.

We put exhaustive team documentation in place and created a set of processes established to ensure smooth running and a healthy number of folks actively participating in the team. Now we would move to work on setting up the processes around our own apprenticeship/mentorship program. Speaking of which, I would like to express my warm gratitude to Ashlyn Knox for leading the Fedora Websites 3.0 efforts, Onuralp Sezer for being such an awesome Mindshare representative, Francois Andrieu for handling everything related to the infrastructure, Mairin Duffy for her constant guidance and all others whom I could not mention.

This article was originally posted on Fedora Commblog on 18 October 2022.