Re: [ML] Hosting of gnustep.org

[David Chisnall]

On 19/01/2021 12:12, H. Nikolaus Schaller wrote:
> How would all this work for dynamic content 
> likehttp://www.gnustep.org/softwareindex/  ?

Can you be a bit more specific?  At first glance, that looks pretty 
static: There's a top-level index page and a load of child pages.  I'd 
put each of the entries in a Markdown file with the metadata in the YAML 
frontmatter.  Jekyll can load that as a collection, sort and index it, 
and generate the main page and each sub page from templates.  Each of 
the sub-indexes (Application, Developer Tool) and so on is just the 
top-level index filtered by things that match some key in the metadata.

The only dynamic thing that seems to work is the search box.  Given that 
this is searching from under a hundred things, all of which can be 
downloaded in a single HTTP request quite cheaply, you could do that 
client side in less than one network round trip time.

> How can you make pages that can be sorted/filtered dynamically on user-request?

Normally, with client-side JavaScript.  I realise that some people 
dislike JavaScript, but in 2021 I think that battle is probably lost.

There are off-the-shelf JavaScript things for sortable / filterable / 
searchable tables, I quite like this one, which gives you a single .js 
file and falls back to a non-sortable table gracefully if JavaScript is 
disabled:

http://www.kryogenix.org/code/browser/sorttable/

I don't seem to be able to sort the table with the live version and the 
filter by OS and Model boxes let me filter by Any, with no other options 
in the drop-down.

Making the filter box work on the summary table is pretty trivial, just 
iterate over the table entries, hide (set the hidden property in the 
DOM) any table rows that don't match the search term.

Using a database or any server-side scripting seems massively 
overengineered for this.  If the software index grows to have thousands 
of entries, I'd change my mind, but the complete data for the summary 
table is likely to be a couple of K and so you're likely to need more 
network traffic for boilerplate on multiple page requests with the same 
template than you save by filtering the contents on the server.

> How can you make a page with user-generated change requests send out an e-mail 
> to reviewers for approval?

I wouldn't.  Folks that want to update it can raise a GitHub PR that has 
their new Markdown file in it.  They can install the github-pages Ruby 
Gem and run jekyll-serve locally to test how their changes will look 
before submitting.  GitHub automatically sends emails about PRs to all 
maintainers of a project.

I've seen this scale to projects with hundreds of contributors, I don't 
imagine GNUstep having problems with it.  Looking at that index, it 
appears as if it averages less than one update per month currently.

David