Better spring cleaning

[jarrodu]

See #546

[jarrodu]

I am going to go ahead to merge this in. Let me know if I was a bit to hasty. :-)

[heathermiller]

Yeah, it was a bit too hasty. I didn't have time to go through your layout changes. It would really help to have screenshots or explanations of what you did and why.

[jarrodu]

Sure no problem. How do I revert the commit?

[heathermiller]

No need to revert. Could you just explain what the rationale was for the layout changes? Worst case if we need to tweak anything, we can do in a follow up (probably don't have to though :))

[jarrodu]

Okay sounds good. I will prepare something in a few minutes.

[jarrodu]

The motivation of these changes is to give a future contributor a cleaner and simpler source code directory to work with. There are rumors that a person may be hired to redo the websites. So making it as easy as possible for this person to get up and running seems like a great idea.

In the first pass I went through and removed any files that seemed old and unused. There were quite a few files that had not been touched in years so they were removed. I also removed a lot of commented out code with the idea that anything was actually needed could be retrieved from the file histories.

Some larger changes were made to the templates to reduce duplicated code and to make it easier to reason about. For instance a base template was added. The default template was blank and did nothing so it was removed and all references to it were also removed. Some html pages where nearly bank and all the content of the page was in a template file. This was changed. The index page for the downloads directory is an example of this. The main index for the site is still like this and I will likely add an issue at some point about it.

There was also a small design change that again was mostly motivated by the desire to simplify the templates. I added a table of contents to a few pages that did not have them previously. I think this is also a good design choice since it keeps each page on the site consistent with the other pages.

I also removed quite a few yaml variables that were not being used in the pages.

I probability should have typed this up when I first introduced the PR instead of writing it after the PR got merged into master. Live and learn.

[heathermiller]

This all sounds good to me. Thanks for the rationale :)

[heathermiller]

I looked through the changes yesterday, most stuff seemed like a good idea. You worried me a bit on the tocs, but otherwise most changes looked sensible to me.

The only thing I'm concerned about is the removal of _tools/redirections.text. I thought that something (not in this repository) was using that serverside. Maybe @fsalvi knows?

[fsalvi]

No, it's ok for the redirections, the file is not used on the server...