New improved Stan docs website

Publicity
1

Stan docs have a new look and are now built using Quarto!

check them out!

2

These look good.

May I recommend that there is some kind of link to the pdf location at some point on the main pages of these?

3

excellent suggestion! add links to pdfs from docs homepage and overview pages ¡ Issue #736 ¡ stan-dev/docs ¡ GitHub

4

I like the new look! My only suggestion is that there should be a link back to the mc-stan.org home page somewhere. Clicking on the Stan logo just takes you to the documentation home.

5

Nice! I didn’t notice a dark mode as we had before which I used, but that’s available in Quarto too: Quarto – HTML Theming

6

request noted - add dark mode for website ¡ Issue #738 ¡ stan-dev/docs ¡ GitHub

7

updates:

  • links to pdfs from the docs landing page are live

  • we’ve added an online index for the Stan Functions Reference - Alphabetical Index

8

Dark mode is now available! Just in time for the US eclipse ;)

9

Here’s a very preliminary version of using the Stan docs theming for the mc-stan.org website: Stan

The repo is here: GitHub - mitzimorris/stan-website: Do-over of mc-stan.org using quarto and mc-stan.org/docs theming

This is very much a work in progress and your feedback and comments are most welcome!

There’s several more pages of great content in the stan-dev.github.io repo that needs to be ported over - if you’d like to help with the updating and reorganization, please file issues or PRs on this repo.

10

Stan: Open-Source Software for Statistical Modeling

This is more clear than the current website but I think it would be better to be more clear with something like

Stan: A Programming Language and Ecosystem for Statistical Modeling

Interfaces for Python, R, and Julia

I think we should say “and more” somewhere. I think there is a statsstan and matlabstan?

Legacy interfaces:

  • RStan (latest supported Stan release: 2.32)

Ben still maintains this and it’s used by many packages so idt we should label it as legacy

When you click one of the links in Documentation can we have it open a new tab instead of going to a new site? The header changed after I clicked and I was confused

Can we have ‘related tools’ be a page that lists the different packages like how the CRAN Task Views look?

I know the “About the Stan Project” is inherited from the old site but we should really have a space that says “here is what Stan does”

Overall I like it!

11

we might be getting Rust interface.

at one point I think different contributors developed StataStan, ScalaStan, MatlabStan.
if we list them, we’d need to figure out what Stan release a user would have to install in order to run them - I don’t know enough about the implementations to know whether or not they’d break on V 2.34.

you’re correct. bad use of “legacy”. we need a more nuanced discussion here.

while it’s cool to have lots of different interfaces, the ones that matter are the one that are (most) used, and for the best user experience, we shouldn’t advertise things that no longer work.

12

The last commit has been 7 years ago. I assume it’s not working well anymore. Based on the issues and PRs, someone has been using it still in 2023 by fixing it themselves, but @brian-lau nor anyone else has not touched the repo or replied to any issues or PRs in 7 years.

13

This looks great!

In addition to Steve’s suggestions, it looks like the Related Tools dropdown is missing a bunch of the important R packages. They are listed in the Other Packages dropdown at the new docs page Stan Docs - Stan Documentation (I think that list is up to date).

Thanks for working on this!