We’ve got some big news! We just deployed a refresh of ROS.org. We’ve been working on this for months and we finally felt that we had enough complete to launch. The old ROS.org was a Wordpress website from about 2011 so we were well overdue for an update. Along with the new website, we’re also happy to announce a new ROS explainer video (with captions). We hope that this video can assist the community in explaining what ROS is, who uses it, and why it is important to those unfamiliar with ROS. I want to sincerely thank everyone who helped to make the video happen.
Our primary goal with this new website was to make it a community effort, that is to say we wanted to give the community the ability to contribute content and features. To make this happen, we opted to use the Nanoc static website generator. If you’ve ever edited a Github page you should be able to edit the new ROS.org following the same process. If you can edit a Markdown file you can contribute to ROS.org. The current website is what I would call a minimal viable product; all the necessary pieces and parts are there, but there are quite a few features that we would like to add in the future. For example, we still need to do a lot of work to automate deployment and testing and re-enable some features. I have a rough roadmap that I will ticket out soon. We want to make ROS.org a one-stop-shop for those who are new to ROS. In the coming months we’ll be adding content and features as time permits (for example, lists of robots and components, schwag sales, and events). We would like the community to make regular contributions to ROS.org so it’s always up to date. If you have an idea for a new page or feature, drop me a line on ROS Discourse, and we can see if we can make it happen.
To kick off the process of community involvement, I want to propose a friendly competition: let’s build some 404 pages! As it stands we don’t have a 404 page and I would love to see what the community can put together! The rules are simple, put together a 404 page and send us a pull request and then drop a link below (perhaps with a screenshot to make things easy for everyone). People like choose their favorite using the heart button. On about 12/1/2021 we’ll pick the most liked 404 page and deploy it on the website. Even if you don’t make a 404 page please check them out and let us know which one(s) you like by giving the PRs a thumbs up.
My few first-hand ideas regarding the landing page (I’m not a good UI designer, so I rather won’t send PRs):
There’s no explanation what’s the difference between ROS 1 and ROS 2… I think that 1 or 2 sentences would really help people orient in the ROS 1/2 world.
The Install section could have the “ROS 1” and “ROS 2” logos or text above the Noetic/Foxy paragraphs, to visually help determining what name of ROS release is for which ROS version
Support section is missing a direct link to ROS 1 wiki (it’s hidden in the page footer, but it took me about 3 minutes to discover it)… Also, the word Documentation might be too scary for newcomers, who probably rather search for Tutorials
The footer is inconsistent: “ros 1 docs” for ROS 1 documentation vs. “documentation” for ROS 2 documentation
I wanted to help with this new website, but I was just thinking mainly about animations and other things, after reading your comment it was like “well, it seems like there would be some content related contribs needed here”.
There’s no explanation what’s the difference between ROS 1 and ROS 2… I think that 1 or 2 sentences would really help people orient in the ROS 1/2 world.
Agree. [This is on the roadmap but I filed a ticket just for you.](https://There’s no explanation what’s the difference between ROS 1 and ROS 2… I think that 1 or 2 sentences would really help people orient in the ROS 1/2 world. The Install section could have the “ROS 1” and “ROS 2” logos or text above the Noetic/Foxy paragraphs, to visually help determining what name of ROS release is for which ROS version Support section is missing a direct link to ROS 1 wiki (it’s hidden in the page footer, but it took me about 3 minutes to discover it)… Also, the word Documentation might be too scary for newcomers, who probably rather search for Tutorials The footer is inconsistent: “ros 1 docs” for ROS 1 documentation vs. “documentation” for ROS 2 documentation)
The Install section could have the “ROS 1” and “ROS 2” logos or text above the Noetic/Foxy paragraphs, to visually help determining what name of ROS release is for which ROS version
We don’t have a ton of styling capability unless we drop into html. It is sufficient as is.
Support section is missing a direct link to ROS 1 wiki (it’s hidden in the page footer, but it took me about 3 minutes to discover it)… Also, the word Documentation might be too scary for newcomers, who probably rather search for Tutorials
We went back and forth on the wiki, I agree with you, a few others didn’t. Generally this page is going to be focsed on ROS 2. I’m not going to focus on ROS 1 support.
The footer is inconsistent: “ros 1 docs” for ROS 1 documentation vs. “documentation” for ROS 2 documentation
the suggestion was to provide a link to the ROS 1 wiki. That’s hardly focusing the entire website on ROS 1.
If the claim is “ROS 1 is supported until 2025”, it seems strange (unprofessional perhaps even) to not just link to the available support channels / resources until it is 2025. According to metrics.ros.org/ros_distro, ROS 1 vs ROS 2 is about 50/50, metrics.ros.org/packages_rosdistro has it at 65/35.
Why try to ignore that (still huge) ROS 1 user base?
