Website overhaul

[epijim]

Proposal to overhaul the website

rinpharma.com is currently a Hugo website, and has had only minor updates in a few years.

opensourceinpharma.com, the parent organisation for r/pharma, is a more recent website, that is written in quarto.

Can we:

1. Harmonise to use one theme for both the non-profit and the conference? (or merge the sites so both URLs point at the same content)
2. Improve the experience, while both maintaining functionality like an archive of all past abstracts, and integrating better with tools we use now like sched for the 'live' agenda

Note

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[epijim]

Nice examples of themes in quarto

• https://realworlddatascience.net/
• https://opensourceinpharma.com

[epijim]

https://vistales.github.io/Home/_site/

https://nbdev.fast.ai/

[epijim]

@harveyl888 and @statasaurus - any thoughts on the theme? I'd lean to https://opensourceinpharma.com/, as it's quarto and we already use it for the non-profit. But open to anything.

[epijim]

Built content

Current built content includes:

• build_scripts/build_team.R
• build_scripts/build_proceedings..R
• build_scripts/build_schedules.R
• build_scripts/build_profile_image.R
• build_scripts/build_redirects.R
• build_scripts/build_workshops.R

If the 'current event' schedule moved to be a sched iframe, I wonder if the only really critical piece to keep is making sure people get rendered, and then most importantly - we keep the ability to interactively explore proceedings from prior events.

[harveyl888]

I've started experimenting with ejs. We can likely mimic some of the current R/Pharma website pages (or other sites, if we like the format), using ejs templating in place of hugo templating. Potential use-cases include team, schedules, workshops, etc.
Should also consider shortcodes for cta buttons, etc.

[epijim]

Cool - and for the schedule @harveyl888?

I think it's super important to carry over this content (every abstract as a searchable thing): https://rinpharma.com/publication/

But I'd put the schedule for each conference as a lower priority (e.g. this page: https://rinpharma.com/event/rinpharma2023/), if we switch to using sched.

So the flow might be, in the lead up and during the conference abstracts are in sched (as an iframe?), then post conference we ingest them into the proceedings page?

[harveyl888]

Secrets

One thing to consider when we overhaul is the use of secrets. A common use-case is to store secrets in a GitHub repo and use as environment variables. This works great when working as a single developer or when developing as a team if everything passes through GitHub. Challenge with a website, especially when changing to a new format, will be testing locally before pushing. I vote to reconsider how we manage, or if we even need, secrets, so that we can test locally before deployment.

[epijim]

I think we can skip a lot of that by decoupling the build from the website? We do this in the pharmaverse, where we have one repo that generates content, and then one repo that consumes that content and publishes the site.

That way a website dev doesn't need to worry about the all the code calling (in this case google) APIs.

If we de-couple (which I think we should) - then the website doesn't need secrets and we can switch to using config on the content generation repo, so you can use your secret I assume? (although I think this works out the box with gargle so might not be an issue in our case). And then I don't see an issue someone working on the code that processes proceedings (which would now be a different repo to the website) needs to setup their gdrive auth.

[epijim]

Roundtables content

Currently this (https://rinpharma.github.io/roundtables/) is hard to find.

Need to decide if we integrate the content into the site, or build into the new site links

@harveyl888 and @statasaurus