Add version 2 beta for restructuring the tutorial

[amakarudze]

Issue description

The tutorial is too long and having to read information for other platforms makes it even longer. However, making the restructuring change to the tutorial is a huge change as seen in #1796 and merging this in would cause problems for the translations. A better way of introducing this change is to introduce version 2 beta of the tutorial and give people the option to choose which tutorial they will use.

Language

No

Operating system/Platform

Linux, Mac OSX, Windows, ChromeBook, RunCode

[das-g]

So what's the idea here. Duplicating the content to have it with the current structure in one place and in the new structure at another place? If so, please don't, as that would double the content to be maintained and might risk the two versions diverging in other aspects than just structure. (And I don't think it'd make translations easier, either. Quite the contrary.)

Let's think this through and if possible find another solution how we can change the structure, maybe incrementally and in a more easily reviewable manner.

[amakarudze]

The idea is to investigate a suggestion given by @elena on #1796 to see whether having version 2 beta would work or not so I am playing around with this on my local machine for now. I do get your concern about two versions being difficult to maintain but the idea of having a newer version is so that the old version can be deprecated and people switch to the newer version smoothly.

I understand your concerns about translations being difficult to update after changes to the structure of the tutorial. Still, we can't be held back from making the tutorial shorter and easier for women attending our workshops. The goal of Django Girls is to make learning coding easier for the women and not maintenance easier for those handling our translations (whom we very much appreciate by the way).

I recently organized a Django Girls event. It was terrible seeing how attendees got errors they couldn't resolve simply because they followed instructions for the Linux platform when they were on Windows. Next year Django Girls turns 10 and it means for 10 years we have just been adding to the tutorial and making it confusing for our intended audience. It also means that for 10 years we have failed to listen to the feedback about our tutorial being too long and too difficult to follow because of the many sections involved for various platforms.

When I added RunCode instructions, it was a nightmare to find sections of the tutorial I needed to add content to. Someone recently suggested using GitHub CodeSpaces and while it is a good idea, it's difficult to add it as the tutorial is right now because that would mean someone will have to go through Note: If you are on... for 5 different platforms which is very inconvenient for the attendees.

Making incremental changes to the structure does not work as you need to change the navigation as well and will make the tutorial even more confusing for the attendees. You can give it a try yourself on the translations you manage to see if it works. Also, a lot of work has already been put into the other PR which would be a waste at this point as other people are now reviewing it so while I work with reviewers on the other PR, I will be investigating this as well.

And again, speaking as a trustee (because this is something the trustees have agreed on) the goal is not to make it easier for us as maintainers of the tutorial and translations but for the women we are making these resources for. When the tutorial was developed 10 years ago, it was only in English and was later translated into other languages as years went by. The same can still happen after we make changes to the tutorial structure, starting with the English version.

Again, this issue is for investigating the possibility of version 2 versus a major overhaul of the current version. If this doesn't work locally as expected, I will happily close the issue but only after doing the necessary research on how this would look.

I hope you understand where we are coming from as Django Girls Foundation trustees and what we hope to achieve by this.

And thanks for all your work on Django Girls resources!

[das-g]

I'm not at all opposed at restructuring the tutorial or making it shorter. I just think this should be done in the main copy and step by step, to keep each chunk of changes reviewable. Of course, each of these chunks should leave the tutorial in a usable state, and thus make also all navigation changes related to content that has been moved around. I appreciate that it might be hard and tedious to split up a great vision one has for a new, better structure into such piecework changes that only together achieve it, but I do think it's possible. (For example, it'd help review a lot if a PR is only moving content around and making changes necessary for its new location, but wouldn't at the same time re-flow the source line breaks.)

However, if there's indeed people capable and willing to review PR #1796 with its current scope, we can of course also follow that way. For me, it's infeasible to review something like that in my free time, but I don't need to review each and every change made to the tutorial.

As for the translations: Yes, they might need to be refreshed when content is moved around, but Crowdin's translation memory should make that fairly easy, if a bit laborious. But when content is being copied you risk ending up with (for the same language) several different "newest"/"best" translations for essentially the same content.