DOC: more modern sphinx theme

[jorisvandenbossche]

We currently use a slightly adapted version of the 'nature' theme (you can also see it in this list of built-in themes: http://www.sphinx-doc.org/en/stable/theming.html#builtin-themes).

I think this can use an update, for some reasons:

• a mobile friendly theme (more and more useful, and currently this completely fails on mobile)
• more powerful theme (allowing eg better nested structure of the docs, which could enable a reorganisation of the docs. Now we have a single flat table of contents on the left)
• refreshed look (but this is subjective of course :-))

(could go together with a refresh of the main website as well, but not necessarily I think)

http://www.writethedocs.org/guide/tools/sphinx-themes/

[TomAugspurger]

This would help out with #15539 (nbsphinx for notebook build), as the generated HTML tables inherit the not so nice table sytling

(other than that nbsphinx worked flawlessly. Pretty amazing).

[jorisvandenbossche]

@stijnvanhoey would like to do some work on this. I was personally thinking about creating a separate repo (eg 'pandas-dev/pandas-sphinx-theme'), just to not create more traffic on our main repo (about something not core pandas related). But that would then mean to eg use git submodule to include the sphinx theme here in our docs (what eg numpy does: https://github.com/numpy/numpy/tree/master/doc).
Any opinions on that?

cc @jreback @TomAugspurger

[jreback]

ok by me.

[TomAugspurger]

That seems fine.

[datapythonista]

I'm working on a proof of concept to see options to address this issue, a more clear home (not sure if there is an issue for it) and also #15632.

You can see what I've got so far here: http://datapythonista.github.io/docs/new-pandas-doc/home.html (still WIP, but gives an idea).

Code available here: https://github.com/datapythonista/pandas/tree/doc_home

[jorisvandenbossche]

Cool!

For the actual theme, I created https://github.com/pandas-dev/pandas-sphinx-theme a while ago (to have the discussion and design iterations there), which is set up to directly show the different options on gh-pages (the different branches) with a demo pandas documentation:

• current one (master): https://pandas-dev.github.io/pandas-sphinx-theme/
• an initial start on a bootstrap theme by @stijnvanhoey: https://pandas-dev.github.io/pandas-sphinx-theme/pr-bootstrap-theme/
• a comparison with readthedocs theme: https://pandas-dev.github.io/pandas-sphinx-theme/pr-readthedocs-theme/

I will give you rights to that repo as well so you can contribute there (the branches (for PRs) need to be on the repo and not fork for doctr to automatically build it)

[jorisvandenbossche]

So @stijnvanhoey did some work on that some time ago (we discussed some things offline), but Marc, let's not let that hold you back! (we're all busy people :-))
And also it seems you are starting of from the same theme, so that even makes it easier to contribute on it.