Rebuild site with Laika

[valencik]

This is still a work in progress

For the last while @armanbilge and I have been prototyping a rebuild of typelevel.org on [Laika](typelevel.org/Laika) over at https://github.com/valencik/meow-meow-proto-site.
The result has been available at https://proto.typelevel.org/ for a few weeks.

We believe we are at the final stages of this prototype and are ready to make the changes upstream in this repo.

I think we need a full blog post on this effort soon, but in the meantime, perhaps some quick thoughts answering the five Ws:

Who

Lately this has largely been an effort by @armanbilge and myself, but thanks go out to many others along the way.
@samspills for her help in some of the first prototypes using Laika and getting protosearch actually usable.
@jenshalm for building and lovingly documenting Laika, connecting protosearch and Laika, and setting such a fantastic example of being a thoughtful and caring maintainer.
The Typelevel community on discord for their feedback and the attendees of the last Typelevel meetup where we discussed and demo'd this prototype.

What

We have replaced jekyll with Laika as the core site building engine. In doing this we now have a single build.scala script which is runnable with scala build.scala to build the entire site. This includes the basic site, RSS, and search.
Along with new content focussing on the Typelevel Foundation and how companies can sponsor Typelevel's efforts.
Migration scripts were used when possible to try and make some transformations more auditable. For example blog posts were migrated in roughly 5 commits, one simplifying moving the files, one transforming the YAML frontmatter to HOCON, two commits fixing links, and then a tail of manual fixes.

When

Mostly built over the last couple months and hoping to go live any day now 🙂

Where

This is perhaps a weird question to ask.
But we prototyped over at https://github.com/valencik/meow-meow-proto-site

Remaining Work

• Redirects for old URLs
• Cleaning up old files
• Bringing over the CI setup
  And folks can discuss things in the website channel on discord

Why

Firstly, we are still ever grateful for the hard work by the 47 degrees team in rebuilding the site most recently. You can read more about that effort here.

Ultimately we wanted to rebuild the site to use our own tooling. Laika is a Typelevel org project and powers a lot of typelevel documentation sites. Additionally running everything from a single scala-cli script will hopefully reduce the difficulties some maintainers have run into getting the ruby stack to work on their machines.