ros.org Refresh Update

Next Generation ROS
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Has there been any progress made on updating the ros.org website? As described here, the website is long overdue for an update. ROS has come a long way in the last 10 years, and the website should reflect that.

Drawing inspiration from moveit.ros.org or even the openrobotics.org pages would be a good place to start.

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I’m not aware of it, and that thread seems to have tapered off (although they ask for interested contractors to DM, so there may have been some behind-the-scenes stuff that never got past the development phase). I think part of the reason for it is because the thread points out that the website does do the job it sets out to do.

I think the links you’ve provided highlight more modern looking webpages, but don’t offer much more content-wise compared to what already exists-- wiki.ros.org may provide a better idea of what content potentially belongs on the front page, I find myself going there far more often than ros.org personally.

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Hi Igor,

We started planning the refresh right before the start pandemic and unfortunately we had to put it on hold. The good news is that we picked it up again a few months ago and we’re getting really really close to a beta. We have all the design finished and prototyped. We’re still working on the beta deployment. Once we get the beta up we’ll need a few weeks to fill out the base content. After that we’ll get it in front of the community.

I’ll be honest, I am the limiting factor on getting the website out the door. On a good week I get maybe eight hours to work on the website; so it progresses in fits and starts. The good news is that the new ros.org is structured as mardown that gets passed through Nanoc to generate a static site. If you have ever used a Github page it is basically the exact same thing (with a few bonus features). The hope is that the community can use ros.org as a jumping off point for external resouces and groups. The current ros.org is Wordpress blog and it makes it difficult to fold in community contributions. The new ros.org will allow for community editing using a simple pull request.

Anyway, I’ll be looking for beta testers and contributors fairly soon, like on the order of weeks to months.

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