HLS needs a website!

[fendor]

Good morning everyone!

While I don't really think we need additional motivation, here are some reasons why we need a website:

Structure
HLS's README is quite overflowing, presenting itself, showing off features, installation guides, how to debug issues, configuration, how to get started with developing, etc...

All in one file! That is too much to stomach for most people, a website can bring structure into this mess, help with orientation and so on.

News and blog posts
If we have any news regarding IDE development, there is nothing to post that to! Someone has to write a text and post it to all relevant news sites (e.g. discourse, reddit, Hackernews (no idea whether anyone posts there actually)) and so on. It would be simpler if there was a news section on the website, where people can write news and blog posts that can be easily reviewed! Additionally, it serves as an archive of what we have announced already.

Documentation
Some plugins are non-trivial to use. Writing documentation in a readme is not the most discoverable way of advertising said features. On a website, we can have dedicated tutorials, not buried somewhere in the repository.

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I think it is worth having a website dedicated to the Haskell Language Server!

[jneira]

It is a nice idea, but a website... has to be maintained. It could be setup as github pages or we could open the project wiki.
Other alternative is create md docs in the documentation folder.

[jneira]

As a POC i've published the docs folder in https://haskell.github.io/haskell-language-server, as it has not index.html it throws a 404 but you can download the md files, f.e. https://haskell.github.io/haskell-language-server/plugin-tutorial.md

[googleson78]

Something in the style of readthedocs perhaps? (like ghc and agda currently do)

[konn]

I strongly agree!
As a marginal note: I had even proposed it once as a Discussion: #1319 but it got silently rejected at that time.
As HLS has been evolving since then, the presence of the dedicated documentation/frontpage makes much more sence than the past.

[jneira]

Well if we can reorganize and polish docs folder and they are automatically (or only adding the link in a index page) published in https://haskell.github.io/haskell-language-server the work to maintain maybe worths it, as we will have a good docs folder and a page with those docs

[michaelpj]

+1 for readthedocs, I have found it very good.

[Ailrun]

one more +1 for readthedocs, it's quite maintainable in my exprience.

[jneira]

I like readthedocs too so prs welcome to add them, in this repo if possible

[michaelpj]

I opened a PR with an initial setup for RTD: #2083