Docs Overhaul

[jhiemstrawisc]

No description provided.

[jhiemstrawisc]

The three primary things I'm hoping the reviewer will look for are:

1. Language -- I did a lot of jumping around during the multi-week push to add new content, and while I tried to do a final read through of everything, it's likely I trailed off in a few sections that I intended to return to.
2. Verbosity -- As a developer, it's challenging to strike the right balance between all the things I know how to do and not scaring off new people with complicated stuff. I was shooting for lengthier descriptions at the expense of verbosity, but if I got too windy I'm happy to trim anything you see fit.
3. Organization -- wearing your user hat, do you think you could find the right documentation to answer any questions you might have?

[jhiemstrawisc]

One change I made was to change our landing page so that people are auto-redirected to About Pelican. Here's screen recording of how this happens (pardon the slow render times on my laptop). Technically this was also the home page previously, but it was hosted at index.mdx. I've moved that page to About Pelican, and now index.mdx redirects there -- this was a workaround to get the organization I wanted, where this page showed up under About Pelican.

Screen.Recording.2025-01-07.at.11.09.44.mov

[jhiemstrawisc]

Another higher level reorganization I was shooting for was to have each drop-down section of the index have its own landing page. That is, when you click something like "Getting Started", you're brought to a page for that section, which has descriptions of the other sub sections you can click through like "Accessing Data". My goal was to guide users through the maze by giving them more and more granular choices of documentation to read, without making that nesting too deep.

Another screen recording with very slow click times...

Screen.Recording.2025-01-07.at.11.11.03.mov

[jhiemstrawisc]

Finally, if anyone does want to render all this into a locally-hosted website, I followed the instructions provided by Cannon:
https://github.com/PelicanPlatform/docs