The page can be found here: https://root-project.github.io/web/contribute/

The titles are using inconsistent camel case. Do we have a guideline for the website?

I wasn't able to find the FAQs anywhere, even trying in the search bar.

From here:

https://root.s3-website.cern.ch/web/news

Note: this is the only page having a "permalink" field in its yml header.

If a user is searching for a specific feature tutorial, starting from the front page the path is:
Get Started --> Code Examples --> "These" link in the middle of the page text --> Click on the tutorial topic --> Get to the final tutorial.

So I believe that the first click is ok, but then I would like the "Code examples" link to bring me directly to the tutorial list. I would also agree with #17 that there should be a consistent naming for the tutorials.

If we want to differentiate between standard tutorials and links to SWAN it's fine, but I would make it more evident where one should click than using "These" link in the middle of the text

Shouldn't mention Ubuntu version numbers. There is not "12" "14" etc (but 12.04 etc). Also this is all the versions, so why mention them? Finally, the version numbers are already out of date, and we will not keep up with updating them. So just get rid of them.

In some case a weird box appears around topic link when hitting the “back” button - talk to Axel

With following URL (no ending slash) the jsroot images are not displayed:
https://root.s3-website.cern.ch/web/manual/graphics

One needs the URL:
https://root.s3-website.cern.ch/web/manual/graphics/

The ending slash is automatically added with the Github I/O of the web site but not with the S3 one... why ?

https://root-project.github.io/web/manual/graphics/

Not sure whether it's intentional.

Before:

After:

“Using ROOT” logos: Fermilab, CSCS, NERSC, GSI

The front page shows "Get Started" both as a big logo and as a button in the upper-right bar. Similar with "Forum". I think these should be unique on the page

Slightly similar with "Reference". It has a big logo on the front page, but if one clicks on the "Manual" button of the upper-right bar then the reference is found again also on that page. For a non-experienced user maybe the difference between manual and reference is not that clear. I believe both the user guide and the reference should be found with the same path, e.g. both after clicking the "Manual" button of the upper-right bar

Maybe News is not the best (or intuitive) place to find the list of publications citing ROOT

Make right “On this page” box scrollable, somehow; see e.g. ROOT Primer

I could not find a way to "learn about ROOT 7" on the website. Search bar helped, but sent me to the old website :)

https://root-project.github.io/web/install/#download-a-pre-compiled-binary-distribution

mentions https://root-project.github.io/web/install/dependencies/#ubuntu-10-12--14-and-16

but that shows e.g. cmake: for /usr/bin/cmake which is not needed for running the Ubuntu binary.

"All releases files can be download from here."

Possibly reword to "And index of all packages is here"?

When in the section "Code Examples", the link labeled as "properly setup the ROOT environment" is broken.

Hi,
I would like to hear what people think about the left side navbar that you find e.g. here.

I often find it very confusing, mostly because there seems to be no consistency to what its contents are: sometimes it looks like it describes a subsection of the site, but it actually also contains links to other parts or the site. Sometimes it mirrors the page contents or the table of content (that is also present), sometimes it actually looks like it's for navigating a sub-section of the website, but it adds slightly different links than the actual page content.

Solutions I can think of:

• consistently use the left-side navbar to describe and link to sub-sections of the website, e.g. under /about, only link to /about/license, /about/team, /about/..., and in other pages such as /get_started, that do not have sub-pages, just remove the left-side navbar
• consistently use the left-side navbar for a flat list of a few "useful links" per page (and title it "useful links")

EDIT:
to make things more confusing, on small screens the navbar disappears under a button that calls it a "menu"

I want to compile a macro.

• I looked in manual section, but that didn't help.
  I have the feeling that macros should be discussed under "Manual -> Basics".
• The search box directed me to the old website, but that's not what we want.

...or should anyway explain where to go to get more in-depth content

The current user experience when trying to get ROOT on their computers is more confusing than it could be, and there is no mention of a few distribution channels. The "install ROOT" button on the homepage as well as the "Download" button in the top bar bring you to the download section of the website, where users are confronted with a choice between a generic ROOT v6.20 link (which brings you to a page where downloads are only one of the sub-options), building the dev version from sources, generic nightlies link, docker, or building from sources again.

The proposal is to substitute /download with a refurbished /install section. When users land there, they see "Current ROOT stable version: v6.20" and a list of possible installation methods, each linking to more detailed instructions:

• download a pre-compiled binary
  • any ROOT version, including nightly builds
  • several Linux flavours, MacOS and Windows
• use ROOT's distributions on CVMFS
  • any ROOT version, including nightly builds
  • centos7, slc6
• use ROOT on CERN lxplus (do we want this? is it officially supported or just happens to be a recent ROOT version now)
• run ROOT in a Docker container
• compile ROOT from source (for developers and users requiring custom sets of options)

Supported by the community

• packages for Gentoo, Fedora and Arch
• homebrew package for MacOS
• conda packages for Linux and MacOS

Maintainers of community packages should be credited, but we should link to external resources for installation instruction as well as user support to make it clear who to report issues to.

Implement Auto complete in search.

Is that okay/correct?

The page "Contribute" page here has two option to contribute to ROOT

1. Via the forum
2. Via GitHub issues.

IMHO, we should have GitHub in first place since this is also the way most people will/would go. Further, the link to the forum is also confusing. It links to the "My ROOT Apps and Ideas" section here, which puts emphasis on applications with ROOT and new ideas rather than actual contributions from the user to the ROOT source.

My proposal would be putting just GitHub as way to contribute to ROOT and promote the forum as a place to discuss your application with ROOT or suggesting new features for ROOT.

See here, the section Picking up an Idea does not seem to be actively maintained.

Should we remove the section in favor of a cleaner message of the page?

When typing "python" in search field, it provides generic google search with advertising in begin and referencing root.cern website - not a site I was looking for: https://root-project.github.io/web/

Looking at https://root-project.github.io/web/primer/#read-graph-points-from-file the output picture seems to be missing. Between the source samples, there is a

img=”graph_with_expectation.png” %}

The anchor seems broken.

Here is what I tried:

1. I went to About straight away. But then I could not find sth there. I tried license first, but no luck.
2. Now I went through Contribute. Tried everything, no luck.
3. Somewhere in Download?
4. I now read through all the subsection names of all main menu items.
5. I have no clue anymore.
6. I want to try the searchbar, but I cannot click into the box below the “Enter your search term…” (#59)
7. A select all on the website revealed, that I need to click the title text. This is a text field.
8. Second search result is a forum post from 2012 giving the answer. That’s 8 years old. Trustworthy?

The website should contain information on how to cite ROOT. Probably somewhere in the About section.

The Reference button on the home page, as well as the Reference guide link in /manual`, link directly to master's doxygen ref guide.

Confusingly, the left-side navbar on /manual, instead, links to a /reference page that is otherwise impossible to access and that lists links for the doxygen docs for all versions.

Reference latest “pro” release for all reference guide links

When you click the magnifying glass in the top right (for searching), the interface that opens is confusing. I could not straighly see where I should enter my search text.

I tried clicking the blue/grey box unterneath “Enter your search term…”, but I could not enter a text editing mode. It took me a while to find out that “Enter your search term…” is actually a clickable text box and that I can replace this text.

Can you please make it more apparent, that “Enter your search term…” is a text box? Thanks!

https://root-project.github.io/web/install/

We mention Fedora, Arch, Gentoo - but not Ubuntu. We should, calling out "sorry, no apt repo, use this instead". That's much simpler than not finding the first step to take because it's not obvious.

here:
https://root.s3-website.cern.ch/web/root-users-workshop-2018/

• Finding "HELP": I went on the webpage to look for help. There's nothing that's mentioning "help" on the start page.
• If I came looking for forum, it's alright, but I didn't know that Forum == Help
• Contact: There's nothing that mentions "contact". I wouldn't know how to get in touch.

Summary:

• There needs to be something mentioning "Help" and "Contact" somewhere on landing page.
• I would have expected a way to get in touch at the bottom. The buttons are there, but I first had to hover.

We agreed at the end of last year to have a code of conduct. The information about this is missing!

I tried to find where that was defined to fix it myself but git grep rootdev returned nothing

• Make sure we are not losing information from the user’s guide which are not in the reference guide.
• Scan the most accessed thread in the forum and reflect them in the Manual
• Add a section explaining what is ROOT 7 (ROOT 7 graphics, RHist, RNtuple etc...) .. why do we have it etc...
• Add an example showing how to use TTree::ReadFile in the Tree chapter of the manual. It is a very common request to go simple from an ascii file to a ttree There is many examples in the forum
  and the tutorial is basic2.C. We can even show the case where the description of the tree is done on the first file of the data file.
• This post refers to the Manual page for FFT but also add a few links. May be the manual FFT page should be updated accordingly ?

Actually no, but the "Pro" and "Old" links should probably be repeated in the list below. Or even better: the "pro" and "old" tags should be removed.

The Mathematical parts of the ROOT documentation is one of the most complex to be apprehended by users. Because:

1. the topic is vast and complex,
2. there is many sources of documentation,
3. there are missing , duplicate and outdated things.

Therefore the math part of ROOT is a very good test for the new documentation structure now being implemented. Basically this new structure of the documentation has three parts:

1. The reference Guide (in doxygen) which contains every thing ! all the details of all classes.
2. The topical manuals which document external packages used by ROOT. The Mathematical part of ROOT has a lot of them (Roofit, Sprectrum, TMVA etc …)
3. The “Manual” newly created by Johannes which is a “map” allowing users to retrieve their way in all this huge volume of information. It makes the “glue” linking things together in order to build a comprehensive image of the ROOT framework.

The work on the math documentation will be done in several steps:

1. Make a list of what is available in the reference guide and topical manual (JH)
2. Remove duplicates and out of date stuff in the reference guide and topical manual (LM & JH)
3. Make sure things only in the (old) ROOT User’s Guide are moved in the reference guide or in some dedicated topicals manuals (LM)
4. Restructure le Reference Guide to make sure the various parts are easily accessible (OC) ==> Done
5. Complete the Manual (JH)

I would propose to use a consistent color palette for the website, the best would be using the colors from the logo to create a "corporate style" feeling.

What do people think?

Here the current state, as reference:

Usually, about is somewhere at the right or at the bottom or hidden in a menu. Why is the most prominent link in our top bar occupied by "About"?

On seeing "Manual", I expected something like the old manuals, a long written document with lots of topics.
Now we have a collection of little manuals on different topics, so maybe one should rename to "Manuals".

https://root.s3-website.cern.ch/web/manual refers to "Tutorials", while https://root.s3-website.cern.ch/web/get_started calls them "Code examples". We should be consistent.

When clicking on https://root.cern/doc/v620/release-notes.html#release-6.2004
because of the size of the page (normal size) and the size of the content of the release (6.20/04, very small), the top of the page actually read "v6.20/02" and visually it took me a little while to realize that this was technically not the release I meant to look at.

https://root-project.github.io/web/install/binary_releases/

has text at the end. That's an easter egg, nobody will scroll there. If it's relevant it should show up at the top.