For the last several months, we’ve been hard at work building a new version of the Linux Foundation Events website. Today, we are launching a faster, cleaner homepage, a more powerful Events Calendar, and a new Community Events section for related events submitted by the community.
All of our actual events still reside on the old site for now but in the coming weeks, we will start to launch events on this new site.
We had four main goals for rebuilding the site:
- Create a faster experience for our users
- Improve the design on both desktop and mobile
- Add new features such as the Community Events (and many others that will launch soon with individual events)
- Make a site that is easier and faster to edit and maintain so that our administrators can work more efficiently
To accomplish these goals we have leveraged upgraded technology:
- We are now using the new WordPress Gutenberg editor
- We rebuilt our WordPress theme from scratch with minimal plugins to make it as fast as possible
- We are using CircleCI to automate visual regression tests on each commit to our codebase
- We manage our code on GitHub with automated Pantheon instances that spin up with each new pull request
- We are organizing our work in a GitHub kanban board that is integrated with our code repo and open for contributions from the community
We did a quick test of the homepage compared with the old homepage and found the following average load times over 10 consecutive trials, measured using Chrome dev tools from a location in Thailand. More tests to come as we start deploying individual events!
Enjoy the site and keep an eye out in the coming weeks for new events. If you’d like to send us comments or suggestions, please contact us or submit an issue.