I interrupt your brainstorming for a while, sorry. As @wblock said, the web site should be done with a new framework (
web2py) but the discussion is more about how it should looks. The two things are not related, however as of the MVC model the two things are separated, in my experience, for what is worth, yes the two things are separated except where they touch, when you will write the theme (or the equivalent of it) and start swearing, you reached the point where they touch. This has more than a solution each one has its effort (violating the MVC is the effortless solution, it depends on the framework, anyways). Once you have selected the framework (or CMS, most of the work is already done, if it fits), someone works on the framework (data organization, extension modules or plug-ins, etc.) and someone other on the mock-up and theme, as usual.
In my opinion, the actual content of the site does not need big changes, it should only be organized a bit with links to pages hard to find. As an example, using something like
Bootstrap plus
Awesome Icons (this is only an example, I never used Bootstrap, jQuery + jQueryUI are more or less the same and 99% the JavaScript library choosen is jQuery) with the actual content, layout and images, the result should not be bad: a menu bar and bottom page menu, a sidebar menu, a button here a button group there (with icons if you like), lists with icons ('<ul>' and '<dl>'), redesign background images (if needed) and the site seems it was whole redesigned.
The thing that get me paranoid is writing the content of the pages, yes, it's unusual perhaps, but writing content in HTML is not my sport, then for my local (LAN) website (and theme, Drupal 7 here) I created a specific configuration for AsciiDoc, it generates content from text files formatted for AsciiDoc in static pages with .php extension, however the content is HTML with only the content of the '<body>' tag (not included). So each Drupal page (inside the CMS) is a 3 lines PHP code that load the page from disk (the .php page created with AsciiDoc) from a directory. Part of the name of the directory (the final part) is the same as the URL alias of the page, that is
Code:
URL = http://example.com/path/to/page
File path = $_SERVER['DOCUMENT_ROOT'] . $sOptionalSubdir . 'path/to/page.php'
and included like any other .php file.
This way, the website main menu (menu tree) has the same structure of the directory tree where load pages. That's for static pages, the only one I use, I'm the only user, so there is no forums, the comments are used as '@todo's (reminders) on pages related to projects.
As someone stated, AsciiDoc cannot be used to generate a website, I agree, however Markdown, MarkdownExtra & co. can be good or not depending on the needs. A complex HTML structure, customized styles and perhaps some other things I forgot, can be done only inserting HTML in Markdown directly, but... HTML is not my sport, then AsciiDoc. The best, in my opinion, should be MarkdownExtra plus Doxygen macros, this way solve all cases (and can replace AsciiDoc).
Define all the styles and structures used in HTML (separated by regions: content, header, footer, sidebars, etc.), create the AsciiDoc configuration (with external .js and .css, no header, no footer), HTML structures as AsciiDoc macros (with hardcoded styles where needed). It took me a bit as I still have to understand the whole syntax of the AsciiDoc configuration files, but it's done. Also created a filter to change the code syntax highlight engine, from
pygments to
Syntax Highlighter by Alex Gorbatchev (I posted the filter configuration on AsciiDoc forum. One year ago?).
