We are currently working on a redesign of the djangoproject.com website. Here is an update on the project’s progress.
Related blog post on the website redesign: the plan, who’s doing the work, and how you can help.
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Is this a good time to suggest we vendor the Django Girls tutorial as the official tutorial? They battle test that thing on a weekly basis and I’ve often heard beginners struggle with the official tutorial which is only good if you already know Python+HTML+CSS+SQL+HTTP, a list of prerequisites that I don’t think mirrors the beginners that try to learn Django nowadays.
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In terms of the tutorial:
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I agree with @boxed that the most common day-to-day feedback received from ‘total’ beginners is that they feel ‘overwhelmed’ by the official tutorial
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However the django girl’s tutorial in an ‘as it is’ form, is also insufficient. I strongly feel that it can be used as a base, along with the current official tutorial, to make the next-gen tutorial
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One of the key areas of django that needs to be included in the next-gen tutorial is the
User Authenticationand here is why:-
A basic login/logout system is nowadays essential for almost every serious project, specially with the advent of LLMs & a noticeable upward tick in website security requirements.
To roughly quote a 3rd party user authentication package developer ‘the user authentication system looks easy at first, but it is an area that has many moving parts’
In practice, many new users end up relying on 3rd party packages for such a key system, without noticing the user authentication that ships with Django, and how it can be extended/modified for almost any need.
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Another new idea is that in the era of podcasts & streaming, it is also helpful to have a ‘walkthrough video’ from the official source that step-by-step, walks a viewer through the written official tutorial.
The key advantage is that, one can simply point to this youtube/online video, to those who have learning difficulties. Some people are genuinely not able to sit through a written tutorial, and this is not always mere ‘laziness’ but in fact in some case an underlying medical condition.
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As for the site itself, one UX spoiling thing I have noticed is that the right section (with anchors links) doesn’t move independently of the left section (that has the tutorial text). So a user has to scroll up again repeatedly, to access the anchor links
Apparently there are open PRs for this, but due to various reasons, no breakthrough has happened.
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In terms of colors of the theme, I’m not sure if ‘OKLCH’ color system has been adapted so far or not.
There is a great talk about it by Tomaz Kenda that walks you through why everyone should be adopting it (if not done so already):
https://youtu.be/sbdkiqwaQ_g?si=tU11RfCHLCi5L4lW
@boxed @SomeAB I don’t think the team focused on the redesign are short of on ideas currently. They have outlined what they need help with in the blog post and the majority of it is people who have skills in user research, design and content creation (my paraphrasing).
It’s exciting to imagine rebuilding the site and what that could mean, but let’s try to avoid distracting ourselves from what folks asked for. Tangential ideas should go into the new-features repo or be started as new threads of their own.
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The blog post is imo a bit vague. “Content creation” fits nicely for an update to the tutorial no?
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Since the tutorial is in the codebase, redoing the content of it belongs in the new-features repo.
If you were talking about presenting the tutorial with the same content, in a different style/manner, that would feel more aligned with a website redesign. Does that clarify my stance?
From reading the blog post, it seems like the missing element is testing whether or not the changes are accomplishing the goals. 1) Discovery and groundwork 2) Design, 3) Build… 4) Evaluate. How we are going to test and Evaluate should be decided as part of step 1. Results of the evaluation should inform a continuous improvement effort.
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