Discover the new ReactOS website

by vicmarcal | February 8, 2016

As you may have noticed, the ReactOS website has been completely revamped.
During the last year, the ReactOS Team has been focusing on entering the 0.4 era, the latest major alpha series before the 0.5 Beta. A common feeling among the ReactOS community was that our (now old) website was not good enough from content, design, and technology points of view to honor one of the greatest releases in the ReactOS history.
Our old site has been serving us for the latest 10 years with not many changes. Too much time in a so fast evolving world as Internet is. Because of this, I was given the responsability of creating,from scratch, a new ReactOS website with a time constraint: Having it ready for the 0.4 release.
During the last 8 months I dropped all my testing and contributing work to just focus and plan this Drupal challenge. A great opportunity to not just change the site structure but also to include new tools which will let you track our updates on real time more easily.
During the next weeks we'll be publishing all the issues and hipcups we had to overcome, but first let me show the new features if you didn't discover them yet!

In this First Stage of the revamp we focused in what we called the "information flow", easing how you can track our progress, but also helping you to actively join our daily talks.

IRC integration

We know users don't have usually installed an IRC client even if there are nice plugins available for the most used internet browsers. Talking with other ReactOS users can't be easier now: Choose a nickname, join us, and just chat. Thanks to the Kiwi client, you can share screenshots, documents, and even being notified when you are named. And since it uses Port 80 you can overcome firewalls blocking IRC ports.

Live Activity

Scroll to the the bottom and you'll find the latest Jira activity. Any bug fixed, any new comment, will be shown natively in the website under "Live Activity" module. We're really proud about it and we've more plans for this module in the Second Stage of the revamp,

Social Activity

During the last years ReactOS has greatly increased its presence in the social networks, so now you can track all the comments and info shared in Facebook and Twitter just via our "Following" page.

On the other hand, this First Stage was focused in "enhancing, sorting and cleanup"

Enhancing

The ReactOS website is finally responsive. It's using Bootstrap for its layout, so reading ReactOS site in a mobile shouldnt be an issue anymore. Also the Gallery has been enhanced: Now you can use filters, images are opened as pop ups, and it is easier to reach to it.

Sorting and cleanup

Now the info is sorted in three main categories "Following, Testing, Developing". This way the info is easier to be spotted. A right side bar menu has been created to access easily to the most important pages. We've increased the linkage redundancy while removing duplicated pages or content.

This revamp was planned to be done in two stages. The First One based in content and new features, and a Second one with two main points: "Internationalization/Multilingual" and "Feedback".

Internationalization/Multilingual

As you have probably noticed the website is now totally in English. The multilingual site won't arrive until the Second stage. There are several reasons behind this decission, being the main one how hackish Drupal internationalization is: Providing proper internationalization is not trivial in Drupal compared with other CMSes. So although internationalization has been disabled, translations however are not lost, we'd be using them where possible(as News and Posts translations) when the time comes. More info about internationalization will be shared in upcoming posts.

Feedback

As any new deployed website it's really probable you'll find tons of small issues. Please report them in our Jira so we can fix any detected broken links, or responsive issues. When deploying the Second stage most of the bugs reported should be already fixed.

Coding a new whole website has been pretty time-consuming, and It couldn't have become possible without the guidance of Amine Khaldi, the sysadmin work of Colin and Heiss, the proof reading of Ged and all the suggestions/feedback from other ReactOS members.