Offer to help with the website

[amirmohsen]

Hey, I've started using nw.js and really enjoying it. I think the website definitely needs more work, but is probably low on your priorities. So if you are open to help, I am willing to help out with the website in any way I can. Let me know.

[dcohenb]

Hi Amir
Your help would be much appreciated
please take a look at the dev branch of the website. you can find there the design we are working on and the pages that are missing.
feel free to sumbit pull request for review

[amirmohsen]

Alright cool. Will do.

[amirmohsen]

Is the node server only for dev purposes or are you actually using it on the live server? The reason I ask is that it can definitely benefit from some improvements but I'll only spend the time on it if you are actually using it on the live server.

[dcohenb]

Yes it is used for Dev purposes. The idea was to make a builder that will
generate static HTML for simple static file server
On Mar 30, 2015 10:29 PM, "Amir Mohsen Abdolrazaghi" <
[email protected]> wrote:

Is the node server only for dev purposes or are you actually using it on
the live server? The reason I ask is that it can definitely benefit from
some improvements but I'll only spend the time on it if you are actually
using it on the live server.

—
Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub
#8 (comment).

[amirmohsen]

Alright.

[amirmohsen]

So if we just want a static file generator, wouldn't it be easier to have a gulp task running with a watch? And on our dev machines, we can just run a simple static server like this one: https://www.npmjs.com/package/http-server
It also means you don't have to bother with manual routing. I just feel like a whole express application is a bit of a waste in this case. What do you think? Are you open to that idea?

[dcohenb]

A gulp task watcher could take a long time to generate all the pages on
every change
We wanted to take advantage of the ejs templating for quicker dev
On Mar 30, 2015 10:57 PM, "Amir Mohsen Abdolrazaghi" <
[email protected]> wrote:

So if we just want a static file generator, wouldn't it be easier to have
a gulp task running with a watch? And on our dev machines, we can just run
a simple static server like this one:
https://www.npmjs.com/package/http-server
It also means you don't have to bother with manual routing. I just feel
like a whole express application is a bit of a waste in this case. What do
you think? Are you open to that idea?

—
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#8 (comment).

[amirmohsen]

Well, a watch returns only the file that has changed so no need to regen all files on every change. In any case, the current server.js file doesn't actually generate any static files. It's just serving them. Or is there a plan to actually add the builder to it later? Sorry if I'm asking way too many questions. I just need to make sure what needs to be done so I don't end up wasting my time.

[dcohenb]

Yes, like I said before:
"The idea was to make a builder that will generate static HTML for simple
static file server"
But if you have a good idea and you wanna run with please go ahead
On Mar 30, 2015 11:14 PM, "Amir Mohsen Abdolrazaghi" <
[email protected]> wrote:

Well, a watch returns only the file that has changed so no need to regen
all files on every change. In any case, the current server.js file doesn't
actually generate any static files. It's just serving them. Or is there a
plan to actually add the builder to it later? Sorry if I'm asking way too
many questions. I just need to make sure what needs to be done so I don't
end up wasting my time.

—
Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub
#8 (comment).

[amirmohsen]

Right. Gotcha!

[therebelrobot]

I'd love to chip in too! @amirmohsen @dcohenb, is there anything I can do to get the site up and running?

[rogerwang]

@therebelrobot I'm happy that you'd like to help. The core idea is that we can just writing blogs or update website by pushing to this repo. The rest is done automatically. I think nodejs.org is working like this and they open sourced their site fyi.

[samarsault]

I would love to contribute too !!

And if the idea is using a static file server, I would suggest trying jekyll. It can be hosted directly from github-pages with a custom domain. It supports liquid templates and is blog-ready.

Like, check http://samarjeet27.github.io/website for a demo and the gh-pages branch for the code.

[dcohenb]

@samarjeet27 is right, jekyll seems like the way to go

[samarsault]

@dcohenb should I submit a pull ? On which branch ?

[giacomocerquone]

I'd like to contribute too but the problem is that I don't know anything about jekyll, ejs (this is simple though) and static website generators. Wouldn't it be easier for us to use simple html, scss and js files? I'm writing this also to understand why all these technologies are needed.
If you allow me to do a simple website without any particular technology in two weeks the website would be ready.

[TheJaredWilcurt]

Woulda thought a project ending in ".js" wouldn't be using a static site generator. I too, would prefer we don't use Jekyll, as it's a pretty ugly templating language, and static HTML sites don't offer any real benefit other than saving the 6ms it takes for JS to parse the DOM once (inconsequential). But if that's what it takes to have this site get built, sobeit. I'm sick of us having the better product and being glossed over for Electron because it has a site (and far better name).

I'm the creator of a framework for NW.js called UGUI.

We've developed a faster way to get started with NW.js I think would be more appealing to most developers (for the Quick Start page), as it can be assumed most people using NW.js would already have Node installed.

---

NW.js Quick Start:

If you have Node.JS installed, set up a package.json file like this:

{
    "name": "your_application_name",
    "main": "index.html",
    "devDependencies": { "nw": "^0.12.3" },
    "scripts": { "start": "nw ." }
}

Then just run:

1. npm install
2. npm start

And it will automatically launch NW.js and open your index.html file that is located next to your package.json file.

For a more fleshed out version of an NW.js package.json file, see this example from UGUI:

• package.json
• package.json (annotated version)

---

The benefit to those instructions is that it works on Windows, Ubuntu, and OSX. So you have one set of instructions that are reliable for all OS's. Eliminates the confusion.

I threw in links at the end to the package.json files in UGUI as they hold a lot of stuff in one spot that I've curated from many different NW.js projects. May be nice to create a page that has the package.json file I linked to with the comments next to it but not selectable. So people can read it in context but if they want to copy it, the comments don't come with it, as Node doesn't like comments in your package.json file (NW.js however doesn't care).

I'd like other people's opinions on changing the "Quick Start" page to emphasize npm install/npm start.