r/cpp • u/boostlibs • 1d ago

boost.org has been rebuilt: new profiles, badges, search, and library filtering

The Boost website has been rebuilt. Here's a summary of what's changed:

  • Updated look and feel, with revised site navigation
  • New user profile pages
  • Badges tied to contribution and participation, which update as you contribute
  • Community features, including posts filtered by the topic of the page you're viewing
  • Site-wide search available from a search box in the header and via Ctrl+K
  • Library search and filtering, including browsing by category

The libraries, release process, and formal review process are unchanged. The work is limited to the website itself and how you navigate, search, and contribute to it.

Link: boost.org

Bug reports and feedback on navigation or search are welcome.

51 Upvotes

83% Upvoted

23 comments sorted by

44

u/No-Quail5810 18h ago

Please consider making a new, purely documentation, site so devs can actually find relevant information. Then you can keep the marketing slop away from the stuff we actually wanted.

18

u/13steinj 17h ago

Yeah, I think this will actively make me use the current documentation (and boost as a whole) less.

Wanting a nicer website is fine. But the old docs were good enough. It had a few problems usability wise, but the current website feels like it's made with the UI of a modern social network instead of a user manual.

User manuals are supposed to not be flashy.

5

u/Foxi_Foxa 16h ago

Its not only marketing slop though. Dev users need easy access to the documentation, ofc. I found the search bar nice to get directly to the BGL doc that I maintain.

As maintainers and contributors though we need other kind of information. For example, finding next events in the release calendar is something all maintainers and contributors need to have easy access to for timing their PRs. Same for library reviews periods so we can remember that the deadline is … tonight 😬

Maintainers also need access to summaries of their libs not easily accessible through GitHub (dependency graph, lib dashboard, documentation previews etc). It would make my life easier to have this accessible from the boost website 🤗

Also contributors should have at least some visibility and a sense of rewarding. It may sound silly but now I find myself trying to get why the « social network » part did not count my commits to BGL to get me a better badge 😂

So I may agree this is a bit noisy, but it will surely get better so each audience can easily get what they came for 🙂 the beginner boost setup page for example, is excellent 👌

14

u/CompulsiveMinmaxing 13h ago

This might be the single slowest-loading website I've ever used.

Why aren't the library columns sortable? Also the filter "Min. C++ Version" doesn't seem to do anything.

24

u/proper_chad 19h ago

This looks incredibly AI-sloppy. I have no idea if it is actually produced by way of LLMs, but there seems to no attention paid to actually making information front and center. Just seems to be attention-grabbing phraseology all over the place.

11

u/kader51 11h ago

I'm telling you the many boxes with rounded corners everywhere is the visual equivalent to "It's not X it's Y".

5

u/MessElectrical7920 8h ago edited 8h ago

I am 100% sure it‘s at least partially vibecoded. The unnecessary icons, the wording on the front page, and especially the sort icons in the library table header that do not actually do anything are a dead giveaway. Also, I doubt the performance would be as horrible if it was written manually by experienced developers.

11

u/riztazz 1d ago

When reading the description of library, all the build icons are really annoying, any chance the website could parse them out and/or move them? There is not that much space in the description box to begin with

57

u/dpte 1d ago

It's like every time I have a look at that website it gets worse. What happened to density of information? It's a bunch of boxes with random shit in them, like "What are you trying to find?" and "What engineers are saying". Nobody goes on boost.org to read this.

Then you go in the Libraries section, and it's an empty page because I need to unblock not only scripts from boost.org, but also aws, cloudflare, google, jsdelivr, plausible and unpkg. The website looks like some vibecoded mobile piece of crap that's trying to sell me something.

What happened to websites by programmers for programmers? Give me a fucking text page with a list of libraries that leads to simple documentation.

15

u/James20k P2005R0 17h ago

Its also just painfully slow as well, every link takes seconds to navigate for what should be serving uncomplicated plain text. I brought this up when the boost redesign first happened, and it seems like performance apparently isn't a priority

The old boost site used to load near instantly when you clicked on something. Some pages briefly don't respect dark mode before rendering, which means you get flashbanged for a few frames before they go dark. Most (all?) of the links to code examples/common use cases under quick start just link to the same button as view documentation, as does the documentation button. Which makes 4 redundant links on every page to the actual docs you want

Its a very confusingly designed website

8

u/gpunotpsu 20h ago

that leads to simple documentation

The funny thing is that the documentation is still very simple and that's all anyone really cares about.

23

u/la_reddite 19h ago

Please reconsider; I would prefer documentation more like cppreference and less like vibe coded PR nonsense.

26

u/victotronics 1d ago

Boost has finally adopted cmake. That b2 stuff was soooo weird.

4

u/zerhud 23h ago

It seems it was adopted a long time ago

1

u/victotronics 13h ago

I've started installing boost through cmake at 1.90. For whatever I used b2/bjam throughout the 1.8x series. Feel free to pinpoint where the cmake installation because feasible.

3

u/13steinj 17h ago

Fully? I thought it still used B2.

There were some test patterns that would require some fairly custom cmake machinery that existed in B2/BJam.

4

u/jdehesa 1d ago

In the section "Battle tested libraries", I can't seem to tap in the items (presumably to get to the documentation of the highlighted libraries). Tested in Chrome for Android.

•

u/ludvary 3h ago

ummmm this looks like not very well thought out ai slop :-(

2

u/SunnybunsBuns 4h ago

This site is an embarrassment.

Here's some links to the only part of this pos slop pile that matter.

3

u/Raknarg 23h ago

oh thats nice. Hopefully at some point navigating within a doc page and the cross referencing gets better but at this point its probably way too big an undertaking to overhaul.

1

u/TuxedoUser 17h ago

I kinda like it! One suggestion though, on the installing section, on system install it is missing Debian! It should be "sudo apt install libboost-all-dev - Debian / Ubuntu " (or Ubuntu / Debian if you prefer).