Quick update 28-Nov: if you don't want to stand this up locally yourself, but do want to view it, you can browse the latest update at https://freebsd.fortasse.cloud

I owe a deeper explanation for the purpose of this large drop. This is work Mark McBride, and to an extent Sergio, have been working on almost all year. The reason I have got involved is because a) I know Hugo b) it feeds the sole purpose of my job for this year — prove to the world FreeBSD is not dying or dead. There is no escaping the fact people do "judge a book by its cover", despite being told, no doubt by our parents, not to. Our 'book cover' is the website, and it says "FreeBSD is dead". It looks like it's not been touched in years, because speaking of metaphorical 'paint', it hasn't. We need to modernise the website inline with the docs site — which does look modern and loved.

Sergio has clearly been busy this year and has not been able to tend to an idea he proffered in 2023 — to modernise the main site. Mark McBride, an enthusiastic and hard working community member, spent hours polishing the site and canvassed lots of opinions on social channels. Sergio popped up a couple of months ago, and suggested we align the header and footer with the docs site, which is the work I have picked up.

There are no structural or technical changes here — this is a lick of paint. Nothing changes in the way people will edit the site day to day. What they will get is a modern looking homepage that supports dark mode and is responsive (yes, it looks correct on mobiles, tablets and desktops!)

There will be iterations on this post-drop, but for now it is functionally correct (I've crawled it with Screamingfrog to check for dead links) and it works in both localhost testing and on a live domain. It supports the existing two languages on the homepage, but has the scope to add all the language support the docs site has.

What I'm asking for, and have been asking for for months, is a pragmatic view to getting this delivered for 15.0 dropping next week. We send a cohesive message to the world that FreeBSD is very much alive, technically, and in appearances. Marketing, if you will. Or as I prefer we all refer to it in our technical community, "storytelling". This is the story of an alive, well tended to, product.

Kudos to a lot of this work must go to Mark McBride. I just shuffled Sergio's work from docs into Mark's work. I am but the glue between the hard work of these two chaps then :)

I have next comments regarding new theme.
It is good to have light and dark themes.

What is desired - the current home page has language switch in the top-right corner, it is visible and easy to find. Could you consider to place similar switch in new theme? The switch in the bottom of the page is not comfortable even for experienced FreeBSD users.

Need to fix:

1. the home page has news, advisories, error notes, press and events columns. Now they do not have headings. I translated them some time ago, and even for me it was not easy to understand what is where. Could you add headings for these areas?
2. These areas have link with text "More". It is the same in all languages now - in English. I hope it has option to be translated. In current site this word is translated (keyword changed, probably in toml file, we will find it).
3. news/newsflash/ (News) page has years and days , but months are missing in dates. Press and Events has the same issue - no months, it is not big problem, date appears in text message, but it was more visible with months too.
4. home page has buttons to download version 14.3, button "Other" points to where/#download, but page 'where' does not have anchor #download. It has id="download" in <h3> tag, that is not interpreted as anchor by browsers (checked in Chrome and Safari). It is excelent idea to point this place in the where page, but this page needs anchor in this place.
5. Top menu - in About menu first 2 submenu point to /about page. Could be other additional page added? Or maybe other page expected in FreeBSD submenu?
6. In Documentation menu after submenu FreeBSD Handbook long vertical interval to the next submenu
7. missing the links to the pages, that are interesting for site visitors:

https://www.freebsd.org/features/ - Features
https://www.freebsd.org/projects/newbies/ - Introduction
https://www.freebsd.org/projects/ - Projects
https://www.freebsd.org/usergroups/ - Usergroups in Community menu
Developers menu - information for new contributors, who want to join.
https://www.freebsd.org/commercial/ - Vendors.

I hope these comments do diminish the major effort put into supporting the new style. Keep moving.

Also comment regarding patch: file website/themes/beastie/static/images/freebsd-official.svg has '\ No newline at end of file' message in the patch file. 'patch' in my system stops processing diff after this message, next files were not applied, it silently skips the rest of the file (or reports 'garbadge found, skip the rest' in verbose mode). It took time to find way to apply this patch correctly. Could you fix this svg file? Other svg files do not have this message.

@vladlen thank you so much for going through all this with a fine toothed comb! You've caught some great little niggles. @dch and I are going to go through your list and see if we can capture them all now.

Many are down to some _interesting_ choices made in the past with how we've done i18n across the main site and docs — a lot of the mapping 'tags' are different. This created a lot of work and hair-pulling-out to get the docs header and footer 'sat on top of' the main site data files. We'll take a look at where the tags are missing, and hopefully catch all the ones you've pointed out.

Language link noted. I hadn't noticed that docs.freebsd.org has a small link at that top right, which takes the browser to an anchor in the bottom left. We'll see if we can make this behave the same, so the link is where people will expect it to be. Great point, that. Thank you for pointing it out 😄

@vladlen The update should've addressed everything you raised. A lot of the issues were indeed down to i18n differences between the old site datafiles and the documentation site datafiles we used for this new version. So apologies for missing a lot of your hard work translating! It should all be back now 😄

Re point 5: I've put _some_ menu items back. Mark McBride and Sergio were trying to simplify the menus a lot, rightly so — things were intentionally pulled. However, I'm with you on some of them, they were probably better staying (introduction/newbies for example).

User groups are linked in the 'Community' page. Developer information is linked from the 'Get Involved' page. The Vendors page is linked from Support.

A few things get very, very little traffic and they just make the menus more complicated than they need to be. See attached screenshots of our Plausible stats. What I will do though is keep a close eye on these stats after we deploy — and if either of these old links die off even more, I'll reintroduce them to the menus.

Lastly, point 4. This is a confusing one. It works on the old site, but doesn't here. Yet the link is generated in the asciidoc, which hasn't changed (although I have moved it up the page in this latest push). If you don't mind, I'd like to come back to this after release please. For now it's 'good enough' that it shouldn't hold us up deploying the site, but yes, it should work properly. I think I'm going to change the front page download links anyway, I prefer the prototype Sergio made in 2023, I think it's a more effective button.

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In D53910#1232897, @vladlen wrote:

Also comment regarding patch: file website/themes/beastie/static/images/freebsd-official.svg has '\ No newline at end of file' message in the patch file. 'patch' in my system stops processing diff after this message, next files were not applied, it silently skips the rest of the file (or reports 'garbadge found, skip the rest' in verbose mode). It took time to find way to apply this patch correctly. Could you fix this svg file? Other svg files do not have this message.

Oh, this one too — the svg wasn't being called anywhere in the theme, so I deleted it. Shouldn't be a problem now 😄

thank you for considering my comments. Could you look into these issues:

1. Home page translation - the current version of website can be translated, it uses only i18n text. The proposed version of the home page website/themes/beastie/layouts/index.html is in English, and its content cannot be translated (at least I have not found the method yet).
2. Text of "RSS feed" links - current version is translatable - it has alt text alt={{ i18n "rssNews" }} and represented as image, In proposed version it has only English word "Feed" - not prepared for translation. Should it replace by {{ i18n "rssNews" }}.
3. List of events and press text on the home in the current version of site is displayed in choosen version (fixed in last months D53647), but proposed version display these list of events and press in English.

I think, website anyway will have some issues needed to fix. If it is published, this issues will be found and fixed, the more people can participate in bug fix.

In D53910#1233684, @vladlen wrote:

thank you for considering my comments. Could you look into these issues:

1. Home page translation - the current version of website can be translated, it uses only i18n text. The proposed version of the home page website/themes/beastie/layouts/index.html is in English, and its content cannot be translated (at least I have not found the method yet).
2. Text of "RSS feed" links - current version is translatable - it has alt text alt={{ i18n "rssNews" }} and represented as image, In proposed version it has only English word "Feed" - not prepared for translation. Should it replace by {{ i18n "rssNews" }}.
3. List of events and press text on the home in the current version of site is displayed in choosen version (fixed in last months D53647), but proposed version display these list of events and press in English.

I think, website anyway will have some issues needed to fix. If it is published, this issues will be found and fixed, the more people can participate in bug fix.

Yes @vladlen, there will be things that need 'tuning' after deploy — this is not, and never was, intended to be "100% perfect" (I'm a strong advocate of the phrase "perfect is the enemy of good"! :)) It is a 'minimal lovable version' - it works, and it looks more modern that what we have.

1. was always on my list to "do later"
2. we'll sort that post deploy as a priority
3. and this too :)

I'm keeping a todo list on the working branch on GH, here.