Today we are pleased to announce a new, improved and more user friendly version of our website.

Background and History

Original website was developed and published back in 2009 when the project was first announced.

A lot has changed since 2009 and during that time the web has been evolving at a rapid pace. Now we have terms such as responsive web design, great front-end frameworks for building responsive websites such as Bootstrap and Zurb and many other new things which didn’t exist or weren’t widely used back when we first launched.

During this time we focused most of our efforts on improving the code and making the library better. This meant the website didn’t receive a lot of needed love and attention so design-wise, it was mostly stuck in the 2009 era.

Over the years it has become apparent that presentation and documentation is also equally or even more important then the code itself, so we have decided to fix some of the “mistakes” we have made in the past.

A couple of months back we launched a new documentation and today, we are happy to present you a new and much improved website which was built with modern tools and principles in mind.

Improvements and New Features

New website includes many improvements and new features. Some of the more important ones are listed bellow.

More modern and user-friendly design

New website now features a more modern and user-friendly design. This includes bigger fonts, better typography and so on.

On top of that, the new design is fully responsive which means you can now better enjoy the content on smaller devices such as mobile phones and tablets.

Improved and re-designed landing page

We know that landing pages are very important so we have decided to totally re-design and re-organise ours.

New landing page now displays all the important information (project features, code examples, showcases some companies and projects using Libcloud) and also features a more clear call to action.

Blog section

New website now features a fully-fledged blog.

We will use the blog to post important project news, keep you up to date with what is currently going on and post case studies and stories from projects and companies which are using Libcloud.

If you are using an RSS reader to stay up to date, we also offer an ATOM feed.

Updated Credits Page

Credits page now features an up to date list of people who have contributed code and documentation.

As noted on that page, the list is automatically generated from the CHANGES file so it might not be 100% accurate.

Search Engine Optimizations

We have made some changes which will make our website a bit more friendly to the web crawlers and search engines. We hope this will make it easier for you to more quickly find the content you are looking for.

The changes we have made include improvements to the underlying HTML markup, addition of the OpenGraph tags and an addition of a sitemap.

Under the Hood

Old website was powered by Apache CMS. It mostly worked good enough for simple use cases, but a small user base means it lacks a large ecosystem around it which is pretty standard for many other popular content management systems.

Because of that, we have decided to switch to Jekyll, a Ruby based static website and blog engine.

On top of that, the new website is fully responsive and built using Bootstrap 3 front-end framework.

Similar to the old website, source code is still stored in an SVN repository so all the benefits we get from version control are preserved.

Source code of the new website can be found in the SVN repository.

Conclusion

We hope you will like and enjoy the new website.

We also hope the new website now better reflects the underlying evolution of the library and the direction we are heading.

If you have any suggestions on how we can make the website even better, don’t hesitate and share it with us. You can send your feedback to the mailing list, or you can checkout the website repository and make the changes yourself.