KDE.org quite possibly has one of the largest open-source websites compared to any other desktop-oriented project, extending beyond into applications, wikis, guides, and much more. The amount of content is dizzying and indeed a huge chunk of that content is about as old as the mascot Kandalf – figuratively and literally.
I personally believe he’s ripped under that cloak.
The KDE.org user-facing design “Aether” is live and various kinks have been worked out, but one fact is glaringly obvious; we’ve made the layers of age and look better by adding another layer. Ultimately the real fix is migrating the site to Drupal, so I figured this post would cover some of the thoughts and progress behind the ongoing work.
Right now work is on porting the Aether theme to Drupal 8, ideally it’ll be “better than perfect port” with Drupal optimizations, making better use of Bootstrap 4, and refinements. Additionally, I’m preparing a “Neverland-style” template for those planning to use Aether on their KDE-related project sites, but it’s more of a side-project until the Drupal theme lands. Recently the theme was changed to use Bootsraps’ Barrio base theme, which has been a very pleasant decision as we get much more “out of the box”. It does require a Bootstrap library module which will allow local or CDN-based Bootstrap installations, and while at first I was asking “why can’t a theme just be self-contained?”, now I’m understanding the logic – Bootstrap is popular, multiple themes use it, this will keep it all up-to-date and can be updated itself. I do think maybe one thing Drupal should do is have some rudimentary package management that says “hey, we also need to download this”, but it’s easy enough to install separately.
If you have a project website looking to port to Aether, I would first advise you simply waiting until you can consider moving your page to the main Drupal installation when it eventually goes live; in my perfect world I imagine Drupal unifying a great amount of disparate content, thus getting free updates. Additionally, consider hitting up the KDE-www mailing list and ask to help out on content, or place feature requests for front-end UI elements. While I’m currently lurking the mailing list, I’ll try to provide whatever info I can. On an aside, I had some Telegram confusion with some people looking to contribute and concerns from administrators, so please simply defer to the mailing list.
In terms of the Aether theme, I will be posting the basic theme on our git repo; when it goes up if you have Bootstrap and Twig experience (any at all is more than I had when I started), please consider contributing, especially if you maintain a page and would migrate to Drupal if it had the appropriate featureset. I will post a tiny follow-up when the repo is up.