Hi, I'm Alex.
I know this topic pops up every now and then, always going through more or less the same process,
but I want to try a (hopefully) different approach.
About seven years ago I learned python in my school and after finishing a two year course in programming
with a handmade graphics module by my teacher that was really easy to learn but not very rich in performance,
I wanted to get to the next level of game development. So my teacher told me about pygame and sent me the URL.
And until today I still remember how I saw the website and I thought that it was just a little students project that couldn't really do much,
as I needed like an eternity to find the download package I needed, not to speak about finding a good tutorial.
Till then I red a lot more about pygame, I got to know the API and found tutorials, I got more experience in programming overall,
but I had such a hard start, that it took me like 3 or 4 years to really like pygame and to find out that it is the framework-to-go-for
if you want to do game development in python.
And all that just because of a not up-to-date website?
Well, of cause there were many different factors, but the website is to a project what the first impression is to a person:
it is what stays in the peoples minds forever and is hard to change.
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By now Python and game-development are "just" a hobby while Web Design and branding is my main discipline.
And because of all that I wanted to suggest a redesign of the pygame homepage, thinking that nobody ever thought of that.
And just to get a bit into the heads and thoughts of pygame developers, how they'd love their website to be, I started reading.
I red through a lot of mails in this list and on various sites in which various people discuss
- about what is good and bad about the current and the old website
- about features the website must and could have in the future
- what framework(s) should be used by a python-community driven website
- and, most important: If the old site should gradually be changed to fit the new needs,
or rather be abandoned and replaced by a new one
The more stuff I red, the more things I discovered:
- A huge statement from a leading developer about what this site is all about (04/2009): https://groups.google.com/d/msg/pygame-mirror-on-google-groups/hy8HUXKcgXY/kdhwVG6WiiAJ
- a complete redesign that never got launched (11-2009): https://groups.google.com/d/msg/pygame-mirror-on-google-groups/rUC5CrroA3U/TzWTWL5cFOUJ
- another redesign with an API-doc lost by students (08-2015): https://groups.google.com/d/msg/pygame-mirror-on-google-groups/1PzFkrIXBFA/cqa6PmEIAQAJ
- how much people "hate" the new hifi version (08-2015): https://bitbucket.org/pygame/pygame/issues/268/an-honest-opinion-about-the-new-site
- the importance of the pygame history and that it should be present online (03-2016): https://groups.google.com/d/msg/pygame-mirror-on-google-groups/1PzFkrIXBFA/Po7R5qaMHwAJ
- quite emotional game-developers talking about how "broken" the website is (08-2016): http://pygame.org/project/3003/
- a feature whishlist for a new website: http://www.pygame.org/wiki/todo#Website
As you can see, all these things are kinda spread over the whole internet,
the oldest one (I mentioned) being over 7 years old and the website being under development for 11 years.
I got another approach. More slowly. More conceptual (hopefully).
I don't know if this will work and I don't know if this will result in a (new) better website, but I'd really like to try it with this awesome community.
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TL;DR:
I'd like to collect visions for "the perfect pygame.org". If you want to contribute, you cann fill out this form:
https://goo.gl/forms/VBg9dofx33Dyflcw1