Design and Web team summary – 2 August 2019

This iteration was fairly light iteration for the Web & design team at Canonical as we had a fair few people on holidays as well as a group who has gone to Toronto for our mid-cycle roadmap sprint.  Here are some of the highlights of our completed work.

Web squad

Web is the squad that develop and maintain most of the brochure websites across the Canonical.

BT announcement strip

Announcing our partnership with BT, it went up and down already, but you can read all about it in our blog.

Added social headers to all engage pages

So now when you share one of our whitepapers, webinars or case studies, it looks nice on social media.

See all our resources >

buy.ubuntu.com

We plan to make buy.ubuntu.com look much nicer.  This iteration, we completed a technical investigation of what we can and can not do to make it look and feel nicer.

See what buy.ubuntu.com looks like today >

IoT overview updates

Updated the design, copy and added new illustrations to the page.

New Suru strips for ubuntu.com

We have built several new css strips that use our new Suru theme. We will be rolling this out further soon.

Updated design on our download pages

A general clean-up of the look and added an accordion for the verify instructions.

Japanese website updates

• added metadata for social media to key pages
• added an rss feed for the blog at  jp.ubuntu.com/blog/feed

China website updates

• added metadata for social media to key pages
• added an rss feed for the blog at  cn.ubuntu.com/blog/feed

Vanilla squad

Ubuntu SSO refresh

The project’s default template and form styling have been built and we continue to add content to the remaining pages, so we’re making good headway. Visuals will be available to share soon for an exclusive sneak peek.

New label component

A new component to the framework, released with v2.2.0. When we add, make significant updates, or deprecate a component we update their status so that it’s clear what’s available to use.

Released v2.2.0

We’ve just pushed out a minor release Vanilla v2.2.0. New feature adding variables $color-social-icon-background and $color-social-icon-foreground to allow custom social icon colours, as well as a new status label component.

Read our full release notes >

Research colour theming best practices

Shortlisting example frameworks to research the topic to see how they apply theming. Next steps are to compare approaches and select the best approach to use in Vanilla.

Base

Added rss feeds to our blog module

These will go live on jp.ubuntu.com/blog/feed, cn.ubuntu.com/blog/feed and ubuntu.com/blog/feed soon. If you are an rss user, you should move to these as they exclude and include the right articles for your locale now.

certification.ubuntu.com

We are re-architecturing the site to be a small flask app that but based on APIs from the certification team. The goal is to move it into ubuntu.com. For now, the MVP is progressing well and should be ready soon.

MAAS

Move to react

This work continues at a pace, but will still take a few more iterations.

Upgrading MAAS to Vanilla 2.0

It is a fairly large conversion, but it is nearly complete.

Network settings

Looking at in-table view of your network settings and how that might work.

JAAS

Most of the work this iteration has been looking at the UX of many sections of the new site, fixing small bugs and upgrading the whole site to the latest version of Vanilla Framework.

Case study blog pages

Using the team blog module to share resources on the jaas.ai site.

Adding more support for k8s charms

Kubernetes charms do not currently work on JAAS, but you can use them in Juju. These updates help juju users find and use k8s charms.

Snaps

A new url for docs

This iteration we’ve moved the snapcraft docs from docs.snapcraft.io to snapcraft.io/docs. With it comes some slight styling updates. Old bookmarks and links should redirect, but as always if you notice a problem let us know.

Updating CSS to Vanilla 2.0

With the release of Vanilla 2.0 (more specifically Vanilla 2.2.0) it was time to update. Snapcraft is currently on version 1.8 meaning the update brings a ton of welcome bug fixes to existing patterns as well as some new patterns. Because of the large jump of version we’ve got a lot of work in store for us to make sure everything works as well as, if not better, than before. The initial migration has been completed, but we’ll be targeting specific pages in the coming iteration.

As mentioned earlier in this post, you can see the Vanilla release notes for more information.