New GeoPandas main website (decoupled from geopandas/geopandas documentation)

[jorisvandenbossche]

Currently the main geopandas.org website (the landing page, the about pages, the community page, ..) and the geopandas package documentation are combined in a single sphinx project.
That has a few drawbacks: we want the default link for the docs to be the stable docs, but for the main website you always want the latest. In general the landing page is also quite tied to the geopandas package, while the GeoPandas project consists of more packages. We could update that homepage, but it's also a bit strange place to do that in essentially the geopandas documentation.

So the idea is that we could separate the main website sources from the geopandas documentation sphinx site. I think we could create a geopandas/website repo to host those sources (or in a /web directory in the main repo, but I think a separate repo is cleaner).

Some questions related to this that we need to answer:

• If geopandas.org now points to the main website, which url do we want to use for the documentation? I think both "docs.geopandas.org" or "geopandas.org/docs" are technically possible with readthedocs.
  (and in both cases we can set up redirects for the current urls /en/stable/docs -> docs/en/stable)
• For the main website, do we want to continue using sphinx? (that's of course the easiest starting from the current docs) An alternative could be to use the scientific-python hugo theme (https://github.com/scientific-python/scientific-python-hugo-theme, https://theme.scientific-python.org/)

[martinfleis]

Agree that this would be a nice thing to do given how geopandas grew over time.

I think we could create a geopandas/website repo to host those sources (or in a /web directory in the main repo, but I think a separate repo is cleaner).

I'd go for the separate repo to make the distinction clear enough and keep geopandas/geopandas focused on the package only.

If geopandas.org now points to the main website, which url do we want to use for the documentation? I think both "docs.geopandas.org" or "geopandas.org/docs" are technically possible with readthedocs.
(and in both cases we can set up redirects for the current urls /en/stable/docs -> docs/en/stable)

Both are technically possible but I think that for the first one, we need an access to domain settings Kelsey has. That is something we should try to get anyway but it is a complication. I personally don't mind which of these two will be used.

For the main website, do we want to continue using sphinx?

Sphinx is a comfortable option as we all know it but Hugo is not a complicated solution either (and I like that theme). I think that we should make sure that the project page looks different from the documentation pages, so Hugo may be a good choice there. People should immediately know that they are elsewhere, like with the pandas homepage.

With Hugo, we will need an access to the domain settings for sure because that will need to be hosted on Github Pages, not RTD.