kicad-developers team mailing list archive

[Oliver Walters <oliver.henry.walters@xxxxxxxxx>]

Hi everyone,

The conversation of how best to manage and distribute KiCad libraries has
been raging for a while now.

Users looking to download or contribute to the libraries are currently
presented with a github landing page and some bland wiki pages (e.g. for
the KLC information).

I have been working on a new-and-improved website system for the following:

* Clear information about the libraries
* A place to download the latest libraries
* Information on what is *in* the libraries
* Instructions on how to contribute to the libs
* Better presentation of the KLC

This website will need to be updated periodically to present the latest
version of the libraries to the users. Also, if users are going to be
downloading library files then it could potentially use a lot of bandwidth.
Thirdly, the generated content should be scripted but statically hosted.

The solution? GitHub pages! - https://pages.github.com/ -

These are hosted from your github repository, and for e.g. ours would have
the URL kicad.github.io - this could be easily redirected from
kicad-lib.org/library (for example).

GitHub pages use the jekyll toolset to generate static content.

With a small amount of additional Python scripting I have created a
bare-bones example of what this might look like (locally hosted on my
laptop for now):

Here are some screenshots! Ignore the colors and simple layout scheme, this
is currently just a framework.

https://imgur.com/a/0GELG

The main objectives of this project are:

a) Present a more professional landing page for the libraries
b) Leverage GitHub Pages functionality
c) Improve KLC

And, eventually:

Provide a standardised way to separate the KiCad libraries from the KiCad
installer!

Thoughts and comments appreciated!

Cheers,

Oliver