[Development] New Qt Project website

[Paul Wicking]

Hi Cristián, all,

Thanks for the invitation to contribute. Could we use the QtCS discussion to
identify which contributor problems we should tackle first, and how we’ll judge
whether we’ve improved things?

We already identify newcomers once they upload to Gerrit; I suspect we need to
look harder at what happens before they get that far. Which barriers need
clearer explanations, and which need changes to tools or processes?

There are also questions about recognition: what do rankings reward or overlook,
and what say should people have in how their public activity is aggregated and
presented?

I’ve been exploring these questions by vibe coding Qt Town [0], with a
first-contribution walkthrough [1], reviewer finder [2], and alphabetical
contributor directory. The proposed goals prompted the experiment; the
contributor site and Qt Wiki informed the content. Iterating on this made me
question how much a more polished website can solve. Much of the information
already exists. Why do people still struggle to find it, follow it, or get the
tools and process to work?

I shared this internally, and one suggestion was to turn the guidance into an AI
skill. That could be another approach worth trying. The question for any of
these ideas is the same: does it help someone get past a barrier and contribute?

I’d welcome concrete examples of those barriers, to better understand which
problems we need to solve. As I’ll only be able to attend QtCS on Thursday, I
wanted to share this beforehand.

Cheers,
Paul

[0] - https://qt.town/
[1] - https://qt.town/get-started.html
[2] - https://qt.town/reviewers.html


> On 18 Oct 2026, at 20:34, Cristián Maureira-Fredes via Development <development at qt-project.org> wrote:
>
> Hello everyone,
>
> tl;dr: replaced the hacky dashboard-based website, for a proper framework (astrojs) for the qt project website.
>
>
> After the discussions on the Qt Project goals that will be settled
> during Qt CS, I submitted a couple of ideas, and among them there was a
> simple one around the Qt Project website (released back in 2021 https://www.qt.io/blog/a-new-face-for-the-qt-project )
>
> You can read all the details on https://qt-project.atlassian.net/browse/QTCS-41 but in a nutshell: the old version looked very bad because I was misusing a dashboard framework to show content like a normal website,
> which didn't make much sense.
>
> The motivation back then was to avoid using a real web framework,
> due to the work of migrating the dashboard, but I have been spending a
> few weekends since a year or so in order to move forward and have a
> proper website, without weird hacks nor forcing a solution to do things
> they are not designed to.
>
> The QUIPs integration was also very unsafe, since I was loading HTML
> that was generated from the quips repo...
> but at least now the version is safer and doesn't do strange
> workarounds to display simple content.
>
> I would appreciate some help on this topic, since I have been working
> alone even from the old version, I believe a proper website is crucial
> for us to present the Qt Project to new people and get new contributors.
>
> If this is something you have ideas, and more importantly, time and
> desire to work on this, let's chat during the Qt Contributor summit,
> or maybe let me know by replying to this email.
>
> If JIRA is your thing, you can file new reports with issues,
> or features requests on:
> https://qt-project.atlassian.net/browse/QTWEBSITE
> (component 'qt-project.org')
>
> Have a great week ahead,
> Cheers
>
> --
> Dr. Cristián Maureira-Fredes
> Principal R&D Manager
>
> The Qt Company GmbH
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> D-12489 Berlin
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