Announcing OCaml.org V3

Initially posted on OCaml Discuss

I am thrilled to announce that https://ocaml.org/ now serves version 3 of the site! Here's an overview of the major features in this new version:

Version 2 remains accessible at https://v2.ocaml.org/, and older URLs to ocaml.org will be redirected to the v2 URL from now on. Similarly, v3.ocaml.org URLs will continue to work.

Community feedback was instrumental and has been driving the direction of the project since day one. For instance, having a centralized package documentation site; or facilitating the hiring of OCaml developers and finding OCaml jobs were major concerns that were highlighted in the last OCaml Survey. They were what prompted us to work on the documentation site and the job board respectively.

We've also listened to the community feedback we received along the way, and in particular, here's an overview of everything we've been doing to address the feedback we received after our last Discuss post: https://hackmd.io/IniIM_p3Qs2UB74cuKK7UQ.

Given how critical your input is to drive the project, I am deeply grateful to every one who took the time to share insights, suggestions and bug reports. Some of the suggestions will need more work and couldn't happen before launch, but we've listened to every one and will keep working on improving OCaml.org to address pain points of the community. Thank you, and keep the feedback coming!

We're also starting to see a lot of contributions from external contributors. OCaml.org is open source, and contributions from anyone are extremely welcome! Never hesitate to open a PR if you see something you'd like to improve! You can read our Contributing Guide to learn how to contribute.

Ecosystem Contributions

As the storefront of the OCaml ecosystem, we couldn't develop the next version of OCaml.org without contributing back! As a result, we've published several packages on opam that we're using for OCaml.org:

Other packages that are yet to be released are:

We've also made contributions downstream:

A huge thank you to the community for your constant effort in making OCaml such a great language to work with! In particular, here are some amazing community projects we are building upon: Dream, Brr and Omd and many more

What's next?

Launching the website is the first step on our roadmap to improve OCaml’s online presence.

As mentioned above, the immediate goal is to be ready for this OCaml 5.00.0 release. With this in mind, we want to focus on improving the documentation and ensuring it includes good user pathways to learn about Domains, Effects, and generally how to write concurrent programs in OCaml.

In addition to the documentation, some of the other projects on our roadmap are:

This is an exciting time! Stay tuned!

Call for maintainers

There's a lot of ways to contribute if you'd like to help. Our contributing guide should be a good entry point to learn what you can do as a community contributor.

We're also looking for maintainers. As we're completing the first milestone with the launch and will start working on new projects, now is a great time to get involved!

If you'd like to help on the initiatives on our roadmap above (or others!), feel free to reach out to me by email at thibaut@tarides.com, or by replying to this post.

Acknowledgements

This project was a huge effort that started over a year ago, and the result of dozens of contributors. We want to thank every one who contributed to the site.

In particular, for the groundwork on rethinking the sitemap, user flows, new content, design, and frontend and package docs, we thank Ashish Agarwal, Kanishka Azimi, Richard Davison, Patrick Ferris, Gemma Gordon, Isabella Leandersson, Thibaut Mattio and Anil Madhavapeddy.

For the work on the package site infrastructure and UI, we thank Jon Ludlam, Jules Aguillon and Lucas Pluvinage. And for the work on the designs and bringing them to life on the frontend, we thank Isabella Leandersson and Asaad Mahmood.

For the work on the new content and reviewing the existing one, we thank Christine Rose and Isabella Leandersson.

For the contributions on the content for Ahrefs, Jane Street and LexiFi respectively, we thank Louis Roché, James Somers, Nicolás Ojeda Bär.

We’d also like to thank the major funders who supported the work on revamping the website: grants from the Tezos Foundation, Jane Street and Tarides facilitated the bulk of the work. Thank you, and if anyone else wishes to help support it on an ongoing basis then donations to the OCaml Software Foundation and grants to the maintenance teams mentioned above are always welcomed.