A whole new frontend!

As you may have noticed, we have given the WebUI for R-universe a big refresh. This is the biggest UX overhaul since the beginning of the project.

The old “dashboard” had become a bit convoluted over the years as features and ideas were added and removed while the project was taking shape. The new front-end keeps the same minimal design, but has been fully rewritten to improve performance, SEO, and incorporate feedback from users.

Also the new implementation should be easier to maintain and contribute to: if you want to suggest some tweaks, just follow instructions from the readme to run it locally and test your changes using live data.

A quick overview of changes

You can explore the new WebUI by searching for your favorite package on r-universe search or navigating directly to https://{owner}.r-universe.dev/{pkg}. Some high-level changes to notice:

• Pages are responsive with a max-width of 1440px to look nice on small and large screens.
• Main contents are rendered server-side which improves performance and SEO.
• Cleaner top navbar which links to other universe content and has a search box.
• Universe (owner) information sidebar has moved to the left.
• Every package gets a section with citation info (also available via the API in html, txt or cff)
• Development and contributors chart shows proper dates on x axis and max 12 contriburors.
• Neat table with overview of package help pages link directly to beautiful postdoc html manuals.

Moreover the rendering of articles (vignettes) has improved to be a bit more readable. We hope this makes it easier to explore all the amazing written content available in R packages.

Browsing all content from a universe

The examples above display information and content from a single package. The top navbar links to the overview pages that show other content that is available in a universe (for details see our previous post: Discovering and learning everything there is to know about R packages using r-universe).

All r-universe subdomains still use the following url scheme:

• https://{owner}.r-universe.dev/builds – repository index
• https://{owner}.r-universe.dev/packages – package cards
• https://{owner}.r-universe.dev/articles – vignettes with titels, dates, and authors
• https://{owner}.r-universe.dev/contributors – contributions from/by this owner
• https://{owner}.r-universe.dev/badges – all available badges
• https://{owner}.r-universe.dev/apis – interactive tool to explore r-universe APIs

Each of these pages has been rewritten in the same frontend system with lots of style and performance tweaks. Below some more screenshots.