ROS.org Refresh and New Video

A screen capture of the new homepage.

We’ve got some big news! We just deployed a refresh of ROS.org. We’ve been working on this for months and we finally felt that we had enough complete to launch. The old ROS.org was a Wordpress website from about 2011 so we were well overdue for an update. Along with the new website, we’re also happy to announce a new ROS explainer video (with captions). We hope that this video can assist the community in explaining what ROS is, who uses it, and why it is important to those unfamiliar with ROS. I want to sincerely thank everyone who helped to make the video happen.

Our new explainer video summarizes ROS for those who are unfamiliar.

Our primary goal with this new website was to make it a community effort, that is to say we wanted to give the community the ability to contribute content and features. To make this happen, we opted to use the Nanoc static website generator. If you’ve ever edited a Github page you should be able to edit the new ROS.org following the same process. If you can edit a Markdown file you can contribute to ROS.org. The current website is what I would call a minimal viable product; all the necessary pieces and parts are there, but there are quite a few features that we would like to add in the future. For example, we still need to do a lot of work to automate deployment and testing and re-enable some features. I have a rough roadmap that I will ticket out soon. We want to make ROS.org a one-stop-shop for those who are new to ROS. In the coming months we’ll be adding content and features as time permits (for example, lists of robots and components, schwag sales, and events). We would like the community to make regular contributions to ROS.org so it's always up to date. If you have an idea for a new page or feature, drop us a line on ROS Discourse or on github, and we can see if we can make it happen.