New ROOT Web Site!

(22 June 2020)

If you are reading this blog post it means you are surfing on the New ROOT Web Site!

This new web site is a complete redesign, in terms of content as well as the technology behind it.

We are now using Jekyll to generate static web pages. Jekyll was created by Tom Preston-Werner, one of the GitHub’s founder, it is distributed under the open-source MIT license. The main advantages are:

  • We can version-control our web pages; the workflow is very similar to that of ROOT’s source, making it ideal for the ROOT team. For instance, ROOT users and developers can make Pull Requests on it as one would do for code. It makes changes much easier!
  • The look and feel of the web site is “theme-based”. We chose Minimal Mistakes with some customizations.
  • Because the generated site is static, it’s much easier to embed ROOT-specific tools like JSROOT output and therefore have interactive plots.

On the content side, we kept all the main items which made the past ROOT web site so successful, such as “Forum & Help” or the “ROOT Reference Guide”. The main new entries are:

  • Manual: it provides detailed information about the use and applications of ROOT. It contains many, often interactive examples, so that you can immediately start interacting with ROOT.
  • Install: an equivalent entry already existed in the previous site, but this one has been completely redesigned in a more modern way to facilitate the ROOT installation on all possible platforms.

The ROOT team hopes you will enjoy the new ROOT web site! Do not hesitate to give feedback on it either via the forum, by creating an Issue, or better yet by creating Pull Requests.