Many thanks for all the constructive comments and suggestions so far, and also for those who have gotten in touch to contribute. Please do keep them coming (either on this thread or on the various issue trackers that @jonludlam and @patricoferris have pointed to). I’ll answer some earlier questions here:
The styling of the /packages sub-URL does indeed differ from the main design, but this is simply due to a temporary technical detail. The majority of the site uses React/NextJS to generate the frontend, and this uses the now-trendy medium-contrast colours and also features like fast-page-switching that NextJS offers. However, the documentation portion generated around 2.7 million individual pages when run across the full opam repository, and so we restored to dynamic generation of the content for that. What’s going to happen next is a rationalisation of the code across the ReScript and OCaml frontends so that there will be no observable difference in the colour schemes across the full site.
Regarding creating a categorised list of recommendations, that is absolutely in scope for the v3 iteration of the site. However, this metadata should ideally live in the opam-repository (for example, using tags as you suggest, which opam already supports). If anyone would like to have a go at this, I’d encourage PRs to the opam-repository to add the relevant tag metadata for a codex. Meanwhile, @lambda_foo @tmattio and @patricoferris are working on the core OCaml Platform workflow information for the guides section of the website which will cover opam, merlin, lsp-server, dune and so on.
Absolutely. The watch.ocaml.org has held up nicely after the OCaml Workshop, so I think it’s in good shape to populate with more videos. This needs a volunteer to help us upload the past nine years of videos from YouTube to watch.ocaml.org. If anyone wants to have a go, please message me and I’ll create you an account.
I’m not sure why you think the current ocaml.org new feed has been broken – it’s been working fairly reliably for the past decade. The only real problem came up a few times when a feed’s domain expired and got taken over by domain squatters, at which point we got spam into the main page of ocaml.org.
What I meant with that part of the announcement is that the syndication feed should not be mistaken with original news on the website. Right now it’s difficult to distinguish official announcements (such as compiler or opam releases) as they are a little scattered (e.g. on opam.ocaml.org). The plan is to combine the platform-blog with the new website directly. I’ve also been considering just having a special tag on this forum so that nice announcement posts could also be syndicated to the website easily (for example, @gasche’s compiler newsletters).
My general desire is to grow the planet feed and syndication system, but to clearly demarcate them as not being published by ocaml.org and to manage them via more modern decentralised techniques that feature spam, moderation and archival. PeerTube is a good example of this for videos that is working well, and I’d welcome suggestions for Atom/RSS (there must be something in this space, ideally ActivityPub-based).
Depending on how the experiments go, it’s very likely that we’ll have a Matrix homeserver for ocaml.org where CI bots can report status information (see this prototype PR) for ocaml-ci that will also apply to opam-repository. The goal here is to for ocaml.org to publish its data using an open protocol, which can then be syndicated into whatever technologies are in vogue (e.g. Discord, Slack, Teams, …).
So if you spot some decentralised syndication system that you think might be interesting for OCaml, please do let me know. Even better, if you’d like to develop one to tailor it to our needs, let me know even sooner 