Since 2012, the CDS website has featured a new main page. We've now redesigned not only this page, but the entire site.

In addition to a new look, new pages and functionalities are also available, while retaining some historical contents.

Home page

The main page and other pages now have a new look and new features:

• the CDS bar has been slightly redesigned, notably its logos
• a menu bar provides access to website contents
• the rightmost element of the menu bar activates the search engine (see below)
• most website pages are available in two languages: English (default) and French; news and events are unfortunately only available in English
• brief introduction to the CDS (with link to a more detailed description)

The next section presents the amount of data available at CDS (updated daily) by data type, followed by highlighted new features and recent blog entries, and finally more succinct (but nonetheless important) news.

Below this section, one will find another introducing data publication at the CDS, as well as access via CDS services such as SIMBAD or VizieR.

Finally, one will find a list of social network accounts and other sharing services on which CDS is present.

News, blog and events

All the news about CDS services is still available on the new website at https://cds.unistra.fr/news/.

Warning: the URL of news page has changed. However, a redirection from the old URL to the new one is currently in place.

News items are grouped by year and presented in the form of a timeline. It is also possible to filter this list by year and service.

Two new news types have been added:

• blog: slightly longer news items describing a use case for one or more CDS services. This type of news is halfway between a news item and a tutorial.
• events: a list of all past or future events in which the CDS is involved.

These two new content types are also presented in the form of a timeline and can also be filtered.

Documentation, FAQ and tutorials

An effort is underway to provide more help contents about the services offered by CDS on its main site. This takes the form of documentation (mainly by service), a set of FAQs by theme and a set of tutorials. All this contents can be found either by browsing pages or by using the search engine provided on this site (see below).

Legals and communication material

Logos, flyers and other communication materials are available on a dedicated page of the site: https://cds.unistra.fr/help/communication/.

A brand-new page has also been created to describe the legal disclaimer, particularly concerning the use of CDS services and data: https://cds.unistra.fr/legals/.

Historical contents

Apart from the CDS website itself, some pages specific to particular missions (e.g. Gaia) or events (e.g. conferences) retain the same URL and visuals. Some of this contents will probably be integrated at a later date with the style of the new CDS site.

RSS feed

As in the previous version, an RSS feed for news, as well as for news from each of the main CDS services, is available.

Warning: the URL of RSS documents has changed. However, a redirection from the old URLs to the new ones is currently in place.

An RSS feed is also available for each section of this site (e.g. blog, about, news, documentation, faq). Simply suffix the URL with index.xml. For example, to have an RSS feed for blog entries: https://cds.unistra.fr/blog/index.xml.

Info: When you visit such a URL, you'll see a Web rendering in your browser, but it's really an RSS feed (i.e. an XML document) that you can load into any RSS client, or even simply download.

Search engine

A search engine specific to the CDS website is now available.

Warning: It only allows you to search the pages directly provided by this website. It cannot be used to search historical contents or CDS services (e.g. Aladin, SIMBAD, VizieR).

To access it, simply click on the magnifying glass icon on the right-hand side of the menu bar. A simple text field appears for you to enter the keywords of your search. Once a certain number of characters have been entered, a list of results appears below, along with a number of filters (on the site section, CDS services and other miscellaneous tags).

Site adapted to different screen sizes

The entire site (including the CDS bar) has also been redesigned to adapt to different screen sizes, including smartphones. This means that certain elements can disappear (e.g. table of contents) or change their appearance (e.g. tables).

CDS services in your browser

Through their URL bar (or a secondary search bar), some Web browsers offer the option of configuring "search engines". Instead of launching a default search in a search engine like Google, you can search on a service. In this way, it is possible to carry out an immediate search on one of the CDS services (e.g. SIMBAD, VizieR).

To facilitate the configuration of these personalized search engines, a website can provide a document in the metadata of a page describing the search engine(s) to be proposed. The CDS website provides this document for the SIMBAD, VizieR, Aladin and XMatch services.

On Firefox, configuration becomes very easy: right-click in the URL to display the list of search engines proposed by the site.