Website workgroup meeting notes: 31st May 2022

Attendees

@alexandersandberg
@daveverwer
@James_Dempsey
@mishal_shah
@mschinis
@kaishin
@0xTim
@TimTr
@tomerd

Action item review

:white_check_mark: Done
:arrow_right: In progress / Moved

:white_check_mark: @0xTim to add contributing guidelines to the repo and link to Swift.org - Swift.org website governance

:arrow_right: @TimTr and @tomerd to investigate with a post that’s currently in the pipeline

  • For context: @0xTim raised current difficulties in the blog process, can we improve this or at least stick to markdown.
  • Pages documents have been required before, but blog posts in Markdown format should now be fine. We still have to think of a way to deliver these for review. @tomerd suggested maybe GitHub Gists or something similar.
  • [AI] @tomerd and @TimTr still to investigate blog post review process with a post in the pipeline

:arrow_right: @mishal_shah and @0xTim to investigate deploying branches and PRs and start thread for interested parties to discuss

  • The goal is to be able to preview PRs via a public URL while reviewing them, without having to run the project locally.
  • We would likely use a third-party service for this that can host this static content for us. Some suggestions we discussed to look into are GitHub Pages and Netlify.
  • [AI] @mishal_shah to continue discussing with @0xTim and exploring the options for preview deployments

:white_check_mark: @tomerd to add a soundness script + docker task + work with @mishal_shah to add PR test for running it

:arrow_right: @mishal_shah to add a test docker task (even if empty at this point)

  • @mishal_shah added test for checking for config errors to build phase.
  • [AI] @mishal_shah still to add new docker phase

:white_check_mark: @0xTim to create channels in Slack for the different pillars/key initiatives (community, content, design, tech)

:arrow_right: @0xTim and @tomerd to setup GH projects for helping manage these initiatives

  • Discussed whether to use the old Projects or the new Projects (Beta). As the latter would have to live in the Apple organization, we decided to use the old Projects that can live in the Swift website repo.
  • [AI] @0xTim to setup Projects on GitHub

:arrow_right: (content folks): kick off discussions among interested parties, the goal is to come up with a proposal for what changes we can and should make immediately, using the existing tech stack

  • Immediate improvements to the Swift.org content will be SWWG's main focus in the near future as we feel this is most important
  • SWWG has started working on understanding the website and its users and plans to come up with some broad ideas that can be opened up to the community.
  • [AI] SWWG to continue async work and discussions around immediate content improvements, with the goal to propose solutions that the community can be involved in

:arrow_right: (tech folks): kick off discussions among interested parties, the goal is to come up with prototype for what the new tech stack may look like

  • We will focus on the Swift.org content in the near future and plan for tech stack changes at a later point. However, there might be some things we can work on or start thinking about in parallel.

Agenda items

continue to discuss priorities and to what degree we can move on these in parallel, while prioritizing what the users of the website care about.

  • We all agreed that it makes sense to focus on improving the website's content, to begin with, as this is where we can provide the most value to the website's visitors. We will try to run with the current tech stack as far as possible.
  • We still have plans to improve the tech stack, but it's not a priority at the moment

discuss the community aspect and how it ties to information design and content.

  • Everyone agrees with the plan to create a high-level plan with proposals and recommendations that then can be shared with the community in the form of artifacts/concrete tasks in forum posts
  • Published meeting notes will gather involvement from the community and we can also take things from there

discussion about UX/UI and how we can make progress there, touch points with branding and marketing & formalizing a design process to consolidate workgroup and community efforts

  • While the website's content will be the main priority, we may need to tackle some design problems soon.
  • The main UI/UX problem we would like to improve in the near future is related to website navigation (current sidebar, lack of search bar)
  • [AI] @kaishin will kick off some discussions related to navigation improvements, and @TimTr can point some people from Apple to this as there are already some thoughts around it

Status of apple/swift-internals merge

Other discussions

WWDC highlights

  • With WWDC getting closer (:partying_face:), @mschinis started a discussion around how we can highlight WWDC content on Swift.org
  • We decided that it’s best to publish a recap with relevant WWDC content on Friday, instead of trying to maintain an up-to-date list during the week. This recap could be published on the Swift.org blog.
  • [AI] @TimTr will talk with some people at Apple about preparing a WWDC recap

SSWG documentation on Swift.org

  • @tomerd mentioned that SSWG wants to move documentation currently hosted on GitHub to the Swift.org website. For now, we have only been able to link out to GitHub from Swift.org, but we want change that.
  • We will talk more about this in the next meeting.

Next meeting

  • Review action items
  • Talk about how to move Swift Server documentation to Swift.org.
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