Design and Web team summary – 16 August 2019

This iteration was the Web & design team’s first iteration of the second half of our roadmap cycle, after returning from the mid-cycle roadmap sprint in Toronto 2 weeks ago.

Priorities have moved around a bit since before the cycle, and we made a good start on the new priorities for the next 3 months. 

Web squad

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

We launched three takeovers; “A guide to developing Android apps on Ubuntu”, “Build the data centre of the future” and “Creating accurate AI models with data”.

Ubuntu.com Vanilla conversion 

We’ve made good progress on converting ubuntu.com to version 2.3.0 of our Vanilla CSS framework. 

EKS redesign

We’ve been working on a new design for our EKS images page.

Canonical.com design evolution

New designs and prototypes are coming along well for redesigned partners and careers sections on canonical.com.

Vanilla squad

The Vanilla squad works on constantly improving the code and design patterns in our Vanilla CSS framework, which we use across all our websites.

Ubuntu SSO refresh

The squad continues to make good progress on adding Vanilla styling to all pages on login.ubuntu.com.

Colour theming best practices

We investigated some best practices for the use of colours in themes.

Improvements to Vanilla documentation

We made a number of improvements to the documentation of Vanilla framework.

Base

The Base squad supports the other squads with shared modules, development tooling and hosting infrastructure across the board.

certification.ubuntu.com

We continued to progress with the back-end rebuild and re-hosting of certification.ubuntu.com, which should be released next iteration.

Blog improvements

We investigated ways to improve the performance of our blog implementations (most importantly ubuntu.com/blog). We will be releasing new versions of the blog module over the next few weeks which should bring significant improvements.

MAAS

The MAAS squad works on the browser-based UI for MAAS, as well as the maas.io website.

“Real world MAAS”

We’ve been working on a new section for the maas.io homepage about “Real world MAAS”, which will be released in the coming days. As MAAS is used at various enterprises of different scale we’re proving grouped curated content for three of the main audiences

UI settings updates

We’ve made a number of user experience updates to the settings page in the MAAS UI, including significant speed improvements to the Users page in conjunction with the work of moving the settings part of the application to React (from Django). We have completed the move of the General, Network, and Storage tabs, and have redesigned the experience for DHCP snippets and Scripts. 

Redesigned DHCP snippets tab

JAAS

The JAAS squad works on jaas.ai, the Juju GUI, and upcoming projects to support Juju.

This iteration we setup a bare-bones scaffold of our new JAAS Dashboard app using React and Redux.

Snaps

The Snap squad works on improvements to snapcraft.io.

Updating snapcraft.io to Vanilla 2.3.0

We continued work updating snapcraft.io to the latest version of Vanilla.