Remove Projects and Pictures tabs/pages

[chrissprague]

I am interested in hearing opinions on removing two current pages from the website. My argument for removing them is that they are not what I consider "important" pages, as defined by their ability to help a website user find information about us that they need, such as current events, or finding an officer's email address.

projects - while some of the projects listed on this page we still have active maintenance of, a handful of them are outdated, and even if someone expressed interest in a project, few if any current officers would be able to describe or help development on older projects.

pictures - we already have a pictures feed going via the carousel on the top of site on each page (excluding some like 404, but those don't count...). I believe we could direct attention to more relevant/important parts of the site by removing the noise (less important/useful pages).

Two compromises I can think of. First, for the projects page, just have a link somewhere in the site (perhaps in a common header/footer) to our GitHub - accomplishes roughly the same thing. Second, for both pages, keep them live on the website, but don't add new link references to them, and remove links to them in the navbar - this is so current links to them don't break.

[khipkin]

👍 To removing the pictures page.

However, I think the projects page is worth keeping around in some capacity. The link to our GitHub org page might be sufficient, but I'm torn on the matter. Maybe we could spruce up the projects page a bit more so that it contributes more?

[zg]

Perhaps keep the projects page but put some more information on each one stating their active state ("Inactive" or "Active").

[chrissprague]

@khipkin I'm also torn. I'm thinking we could hardcode the more recent/active projects (rather than scraping the org for all projects,) but that requires manual management of the page (or, even if better designed, the db,) which is also part of what I'm trying to move away from here. If I had to make a decision, I'd say just remove the page entirely and keep the GH link somewhere.

[zg]

@chrissprague We could get fancy and hook into the GitHub API by pulling the updated_at param from here then sort the projects in the same order that the repositories are sorted on GitHub (descending by updated_by). This of course depends on whether or not we decide to keep the page.

[chrissprague]

@zg the issue with in/active is that we still have to manually manage those flags which I want to avoid, but I suppose that is better than manually adding or removing whole repos. As for updated_at, maybe, but even then the page has a lot of inactive stuff at the bottom which may just be better left to be shown in the GH org only...