Few months ago, @MaximeJ suggested that the main menu of the website could be improved by splitting the “Developers” item in two parts. Details are available in the issue “Main menu enhancement”.
I finally found a little bit of time to prepare a draft. You can see the result on a development website:
As suggested by @MaximeJ, I splitted the “Developers” menu. To provide a better access to the online documentation, I splitted too the “Technical documentation” page in three pages:
API documentation (Javadoc), providing links to the documentation of all official releases.
Technical documentation (static web site generated by Maven), providing links to the documentation of all official releases.
Tutorials, providing a summary of all available tutorials.
The new website looks good ! Thank you for improving it.
We also discussed on adding a page for the scientific articles related to Orekit. I don’t know if this page should go to the Users or Developers page. Because it can have an interest for both. Maybe the best place is the Users page.
I did a small survey to regroup the Orekit related articles. I can put it here. Probably I forgot some articles … So people can update the document if I put it here.
Thanks @sdinot it looks good. It’s more straight forward to find the documentation that way. @bcazabonne I think the “Users” menu is the place to have the Orekit papers too.
You are right. I opened a specific issue about this point because it is not related to the optimal presentation of information to users, and it requires a data collection work that I can not do myself.: Add a page listing scientific articles related to Orekit.
Hi,
I agree with all of you: it’s a good idea to split the Developpers menu with a specific Users menu, and it would be nice to access the Orekit related articles from the web site.
But I noticed a little discrepancy in the Community menu, the documentation is no more accessible from the Orekit forge, as it is said, and maybe the given link should point the technical doc out, as it also give access to the Javadoc.
Just one suggestion: the list of the older releases (for javadoc and technical doc) is rather long and will be longer and longer ! so, for instance, the Learn about main packages architecture (latest release) will “disappear” at the bottom of the page …
Is it possible to put the older releases in a scrolling list for instance ? and just the current and latest could be directly accessible
Good point! I noticed it yesterday and I have consigned in a file a lot of remarks about the other pages. In my humble opinion, if we make an effort to improve some documents (like the pathetic Contributing guide) and reorganize the information, the “Community” page may be deleted (some information should go to the contribution guide and others to the support page).
I agree. For your information, the documentation of these antediluvian releases of Orekit is still online because some projects still seem to use these releases and their developers regularly refer to their documentation according to the statistics of visits to our website.
May be I can put them in a drop-down menu. I have to carry out some tests.
Hi !
The new menu layout is great. Thanks @sdinot !
I think that the “Community” menu could be improved too. Since its introduction, the forum has become the main gathering place for the community, so I believe it should be displayed more prominently in the menu. Maybe the “Community” menu item could be converted to a drop-down menu (like the “Users” and “Developers” items) with a dedicated link for the forum, and another link for the current “community” page (the link could be named “overview”, “guide” or something similar ?)
Or maybe even have the “Community” menu item link directly to the forum, and replace the “how to contribute” guide (which is indeed very basic) by the current “Community” page ?
Definitely, the community page must be reworked or replaced by a simple link to the forum, but the contibuting guide must be developed before anything else.
This week-end, I updated Bootstrap and the website theme. This was painful because between versions 3 and 4 of Bootstrap, many elements have been reworked. But I finally got a satisfactory result. I just pushed it on the test site.
The visible differences are details (like outlined buttons in this page) but this new version of Bootstrap brings a lot of interesting features.
I enhanced too the tutorial page. If you know other tutorials created by third parties, feel free to let me know about them. I will add them on this page.
I’ve just read some product related website recently. Based on this experience, I would propose the following:
Rename the “Users” menu as “Docs”: whatever I’m a developer or a user, what I expect is to find the documentation about the product (guideline, reference, tutorials…)
Merge “Developers” and “Community” in a single Community menu: whatever I’m a user or a community member, what I’m looking for is a way to reach people (forum) or become part of this community (reporting bugs, forking the project…)
I’m not skilled enough in HTML5 to propose a solution, but it could be useful if such list is limited to 2~3 entries + a button “Older/…” to reveal the older releases.
Examples from the community - Here we gather and link all the publicly available Orekit examples we know of. Of course we’ll have to ask their author if they agree with being quoted here.
Right now I’m thinking of:
The very detailed Python SLR orbit determination example by @yzokras. It is long, complete, well explained and easily runnable since it’s Jupyter based. @yzokras: Do you agree with being quoted here ? And if yes, do you want your real name and university written or do you want to keep your forum pseudo ?
The also very good and detailed Java/Python AstriaGraph by Shiva Iyer from the university of Texas at Austin. With a link also to the GitHub repository.
Note that the official Python wrapper is not used here. Instead the classes are written in Java and then linked to Python with pyjnius. This may be confusing for beginners but, still, I think it’s a very good example since it is complete. There’s even a graphical visualization with Cesium and a web interface that are open source too!
This last section can be enriched in the future if new Orekit usage examples are made public.
I just updated the website, trying to take into account your suggestions.
As proposed by @MaximeJ, I referenced in the Tutorials page the valued work carried out by @petrus.hyvonen, @yzokras and the ASTRIA Team (Shiva Iyer and Moriba Jah).
There is still some work to be done:
Add a page listing the scientific articles related to Orekit.
Modify the homepage, especially the “Who is using it?” section, which does not reflect the spread of Orekit.
Copiously improve the Contributing guide which does not reflect neither the practices, nor the spirit of the project (which seems to me to be much more open to contributions from third parties than the current guide suggests).
Thanks for your suggestions,
Sébastien
NB: Please do not hesitate to inform me of any error or clumsiness, my Globish is largely perfectible and I know nothing about space dynamics.
