Making the new Vert.x 3.0 website

Vert.x is a toolkit for building reactive applications on the Java Virtual Machine. The project maintainers are currently working hard to get the new version 3.0 out. Tim Fox, the original creator of Vert.x and one of its core developers, was recently looking for someone to redesign the Vert.x website. I offered to take the job! I consider this an opportunity to give something back to the great Vert.x community!

I wanted to show you how the new website looks and provide you with some details on its development. Here are two screenshots to give you an impression of the current state:

This is a list of some of the technologies I use to make the website:

• Bootstrap 3
• Ubuntu web font
• Entypo+ pictograms
• Node.js
• Metalsmith
• and others …

According to the roadmap, Vert.x 3.0 will be released in June 2015. I’m really looking forward to the new version. It contains tons of improvements and new features!

I’m really grateful for the opportunity to contribute to this great project!

Building the website

If you want to hack on the website, feel free to do so. Contributions are more than welcome!

First of all, clone the website repository on GitHub. You can build the site with mvn site. This will assemble and transform the various parts of the site and place it in target/site.

Building continuously during development

If you only change the site pages, you can activate the gulp watch mode (after having built the site once) with gulp watch. This will scan for changes and rebuild the part of the site that needs to be refreshed.

The documentation pages will not be rebuilt continuously. If you change the header or footer templates and want to update the documentation pages, you need to stop the watch mode with Ctrl+C and start it again with gulp watch.

Previewing during development

gulp watch starts a small embedded web server that lets you preview the website under http://localhost:4000. The port can be changed in the gulpfile.js file.

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Posted by Michel Krämer
on 2 May 2015

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