Minimal required features for the Project Pythia landing page

[brian-rose]

Since this repo houses the experimental source for a potential new landing page / web site for Project Pythia, let's track here the missing features from our existing Sphinx-based home page that are considered essential before migrating to MyST-MD.

We are comparing this new landing page to the existing landing page.

I'll take a first stab at a minimal feature list:

• Landing page is clean and simple and less "bookish"
• "call to action" buttons are appropriately sized and styled
• Pythia google calendar is displayed 📅 Use iframe directive to embed Pythia calendar #7
• Admonitions display properly, e.g. on the Contributor guide page
• Code of Conduct page is findable
• All remaining "Unknown Directive" errors are cleaned up
• A branded banner image
• Blog posts are easily findable
• Footer with essential credits (👣 Add site footer jupyter-book/myst-theme#565)

What else? What did I miss?

There is some overlap here with the checklist over at jupyter-book/mystmd#1320 (comment), but I'm trying to keep this list specific to the main "portal" site and landing page.

[clyne]

Looks pretty complete to me, @brian-rose

[agoose77]

@brian-rose what constitutes "branded banner image" to you?

Does this come close?

[agoose77]

@jukent I see that you authored ProjectPythia#412, which added metrics to the landing page! Before seeing the existing implementation, my first thought was to implement the metrics page as an executable file and build the figures inline. Is there a particular reason that you chose to do this via a dedicated job in CI?

[jukent]

@agoose77 can you clarify how you would have done it? I did it in CI because that's how I knew to make sure the metrics were updated and populated before the book build and publish actions. I'm definitely open to a different method in the MyST version and would love to learn more.

[agoose77]

@jukent yes of course! I should have clarified that part of my original message, apologies!

If the goal is to generate content dynamically, you can use the Jupyter integration with Jupyter Book 1 (and JB2 / MyST-MD) to run e.g. Python code in a notebook at build time.

In MyST Markdown, you can add details about the kernel that should run the document, and then use code cells to build outputs like figures. I can make a PR that implements this approach, and perhaps pull you in to review it?

[jukent]

That sounds interesting I'd love to see it and iterate on it with you. That would remove the need for artifact passing.

Are you able to pass GitHub secrets (needed to access the GA4 API) into the code? I'm sure that was the piece that sent me down the GitHub actions direction.

[agoose77]

Are you able to pass GitHub secrets [...] into the code

My thought would be to do this through the environment. There is a risk there if someone commits a notebook that dumps the environment variables to stdout, but you already maintain control over the repository contents, so that should be fine?

[brian-rose]

@brian-rose what constitutes "branded banner image" to you?

Does this come close?

Yes!

I think I was just broadly referring to the need to have a "landing page" look with some imagery. I think we can check off this box.

[jukent]

@agoose77 This reminded me that we were talking about adding an automatic metrics page to each Cookbook, so that Cookbook authors could see the reach of their work. If you'd like to look at one with me (say for the cookbook-template in MyST) that could be a smaller push than the portal metrics.