The New Cantera Website is Here!¶

This summer, Bryan Weber and Steven DeCaluwe took on the project of revamping the Cantera website. The old website was, well, old and needed to be refreshed. Thanks to a grant from NumFOCUS, Bryan and Steven were able to completely redo the website!

The main focus of the update was to make it much easier for all users of Cantera to quickly find the information they need. The older website was a list of links to locations deeper in the website, which made it hard for new and expert users of Cantera to find the page they were looking for. On the new website, we have clearly marked sections for new users and advanced users to find what they're looking for. All of the same content is available, we've just reorganized it and (hopefully!) made things easier to find.

Old Cantera Website

We have a Tutorials section to get new users started with using Cantera, we have a separate "Science" section that explains some of the basic equations and principles underlying the models that Cantera uses, and we still have all the API documentation that you need over in the Documentation section. There is also a Community section with information about how to reach the Cantera steering community and where our code and discussions live.

NumFOCUS¶

This work was sponsored by NumFOCUS through their Small Development Grants program. This program gives small grants to NumFOCUS sponsored projects to help improve their code or their community. Cantera was awarded the grant as part of the Spring 2018 round of funding. If you are interested in more information about this grant, or future grants, please email the steering committee. More information about NumFOCUS can be found in the Community section of our new website! Thank you NumFOCUS!

Nuts and bolts¶

The website is now built with the Nikola static site generator and much of the content has been migrated to a new repository. The allows us to update the website content without pushing commits to the main Cantera repository and rebuilding all of the documentation. The website is themed with the Bootstrap 4 theme. The documentation of the Cantera API is still done with Sphinx and Doxygen in the main code repository.

All of the links to the old website structure should be automatically redirected to the equivalent location in the new structure. If you find any redirects that don't work, or any broken links within cantera.org, please file an issue on our website repository.

There are still a few things we're working out with the new site. If you would like to contribute, check out the issues page on our repository and leave a comment!