New Qubes Website! New Whonix Website?

Website
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The new Qubes website is looking great. Check it out!

It’s a great inspiration. Whonix’s home page also needs a redesign.

1 Like
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Good day,

that really does look nice. Such a homepage would definitely make Whonix seem more approachable, though I guess it would be hard to realise if we want to stick to using mediawiki as a base for it.

Would it be reasonable, to create the homepage from scratch using a sleek design, with a few sub sites for downloads and starting information, but keep linking to the wiki, as it is done by other projects, like Debian or Fedora do it?

If so, I could create a small demo site based on a nice style. If you have something in mind which has already been done by another project, I may be able to recreate it…

Have a nice day,

Ego

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Mediawiki is not the problem. It’s “just yet another content generator”. Just like default wordpress does not look so well, there are huge [media news] websites using wordpress as their content generator.

There are some intersting skins on http://www.mediawikibootstrapskin.co.uk. For example http://www.mediawikibootstrapskin.co.uk/demos/?theme=Halcyon does not look like mediawiki at all anymore.

(I’ve just contacted the author to sort out licensing terms. Previously they have been under a Free/Libre Software license. Maybe now a small charge applies, but after download, they are still Free/Libre Software.)

The following two skins will be updated to bootstrap 4 once stable (although I don’t like them that much):
http://www.mediawikibootstrapskin.co.uk/demos/?theme=Anniversary
http://www.mediawikibootstrapskin.co.uk/demos/?theme=Hadron

There are also loads of other mediawiki skins. For example on Category:All skins - MediaWiki.

For example, Skin:Foreground - MediaWiki looks good? Demo:
http://foreground.thingelstad.com/wiki/Main_Page

However, if the mediawiki skin approach is unreasonable, we can still go for a non-wiki homepage.

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For example http://www.grindhousedatabase.com/ uses mediawiki skin foreground and almost does not look like mediawiki anymore.

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More example pages using mediawiki foreground:
http://foreground.thingelstad.com/wiki/Sites_using_Foreground
(perhaps others could by found by using search engines)

Just got a reply from http://www.mediawikibootstrapskin.co.uk - skins are not Libre/Free Software. May not be redistributed. Nevermind these.

We do publish our whole whonix.org /var/www folder by the way:
https://github.com/Whonix/www

rough instructions for replicating our whonix.org wiki setup:
https://www.whonix.org/wiki/Dev/Replicating_whonix.org

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wow , it is a change. good one they made.

yeah we need to give it a try for a new home page (which i have failed to find a man with a word to do it before this time).

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What do you think? @Ego

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Good day,

well, if you recall, I was unable to replicate the current wiki, otherwise, I’d already tried a few things…

Have a nice day,

Ego

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Ah. Right. I didn’t connect the dots, sorry. So now I have more reason to work on the following thread so you can be unblocked here.

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Ticket for not forgetting about this:
https://phabricator.whonix.org/T470

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Whonix main page is much more simplistic now.

(The old homepage has been moved to https://www.whonix.org/wiki/Portal.)

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hmm not sure , but u have over simplified it i think ?

where is kvm ?

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Extended the Whonix home page with more text. The fresher text has been written by @JasonJAyalaP.

The text is better, but the Whonix home page still is nowhere near a modern, usable homepage.

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I am beginning to question if mediawiki is still suitable. Originally, I was impressed by mediawiki because it theoretically allows to have translations. The Whonix project exists since 2012. Okay, well, we are not being using mediawiki for that long. However, we do not have that many translations, as preparing wiki pages for translations [1], training translators, accepting translations is a tedious project. By comparison, torproject.org, a project with several million USD funding per year and multiple full time employees did not succeed getting a multi lingual website yet, so I think that goal was too ambitious.

If mediawiki is a blocker to get a new website, it should be ditched. Perhaps it’s fine to keep mediawiki for most wiki pages but to get higher quality project homepage and download page.

Notes on the requirement for the new website:
Dev/About Infrastructure - Kicksecure

[1] https://forums.whonix.org/t/whonix-org-wiki-translation-mediawiki-extension-translate-technical-discussion

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Good day,

Well, that has been an idea I’ve supported from the start if you recall:

Looking at the requirements, I personally would have to look at how to make the whole thing compatible with porse.io, have never worked with a content delivery system of this sorts though I will look into it this weekend, as I finally have a bit of freetime. However, before I really get into this, I have to finish something I started way back in Febuary regarding Windows and the ease of installing and using Whonix. That is currently a mess. A working mess, but a rather unpleasent mess in regards to usability I want to have cleaned up before release…

Looking at the other requirements for the site, there seems to be no bigger issue for me. I actually already created sites purely consisting of HTML code without the use of JS. The only problem I had with those was triggering the mobile version when necessary, as reading the display size is hard without JS code and relying on the resolution isn’t really feasible in these times, considering most smartphones use resolutions higher than some Laptops…

So that would be a challenge to solve, however for the time beeing, I’d focus on creating a nice looking base anyways.

Have a nice day,

Ego

16

Great!

Ego:

Well, that has been an idea I’ve supported from the start if you recall:

I know, and remember. But took until now to finally give up on
mediawiki. I was mistake for the need to constantly update the homepage.
It’s really not required even less since there now is a much simpler
homepage.

Looking at the requirements, I personally would have to look at how to make the whole thing compatible with porse.io,

Never mind prose.io for now.

(prose.io would be more important, if we totally moved away from
mediawiki. To leave others still a usably way to make documentation
contributions. But for now it’s just the homepage and perhaps download
page. If the website is git based (why shouldn’t the code be added to
git), then prose.io comes for free without additional work required.)

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Good day,

So just looked at a few dozen bootstrap templates and as far as I can tell, most of them are either based on JS, which we are trying to not use at all or don’t have any segnificant benefit over plain html together with CSS, as far as I can tell. In regards to that, I actually found a way to create a rather nice parallax effect without the need for JS, which is explained here: Pure CSS Parallax Websites This even works when accessing a site via the TBB using the highest possible security settings and having NoScript active.

I feel like I’ll use this method to create a fitting homepage in the near future, one which fits in with the style of the forum we now have.

Have a nice day,

Ego

1 Like
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Good day,

So I’ve created what could be considered a rudimentary base upon which we may or may not base future work on a new homepage. You may view it here: http://whonix-test.bitballoon.com/ The password is “password” and the site is based soely on CSS and HTML, no JS anywhere. It also runs flawlessly when NoScript is enabled.

Now, as you may have noticed, this site looks a bit like the homepage of a rather pretentious start-up whose concept is selling overpriced VPN’s to users who don’t know better, but that’s what the surfers are into these days…

If you have any more ideas on how to improve/change/modify this design, please tell me so.

Have a nice day,

Ego

1 Like
19

First impression is truly awesome! A lot better than what we have currently.

  • Please add the Qubes symbol to the download section.
  • Rename link Wiki → Docs (I guess docs works well enough no need for Documentation)
  • Share twitter and facebook simple links in the footer. (Like in the current wiki footer. Perhaps with license trouble free images if any.)
  • The leak prevention image looks is cut at the right.
  • On android mobile browser the menu always takes half of the screen size when scrolling down.

And as for the background image or image overall… Emotionally appealing images would be good. Let’s see how you find my idea…

From https://anonymous-proxy-servers.net I find their (1), (2), (3) concept quite good. Although their images are not that great. The left image, the scanned and badly surprised women on the left is not bad and the t-shirt image on the right does not communicate anything related to the topic. (Is it a t-shirt shop, or what? :))

Maybe for the Whonix website we also could use this step based approach…

Maybe also 3 steps:

  1. feel bad, you have a problem
  2. Whonix is the solution
  3. feel good, you have the solution

Or just two steps:

  1. feel bad, you have a problem
  2. feel good, Whonix is the solution

…combined with better illustrative images that are emotionally appealing. What do you think?

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Could you remove the password please? If you worry about search engines, we could just configure noindex for it? I’d like to blog about it to gather more feedback. We can do that when you feel ready for that.