Blogpost of recent updates to tidymodels.org

content/blog/updates-to-tidymodels-org/index.md

@@ -0,0 +1,129 @@
+---
+title: "Updates to tidymodels.org"
+date: 2026-06-20
+people:
+  - Emil Hvitfeldt
+description: >
+  A look at recent updates to tidymodels.org, including a new search feature and behind-the-scenes infrastructure improvements.
+image: "featured.png"
+image-alt: ""
+topics:
+  - Machine Learning
+software:
+  - tidymodels
+languages:
+  - R
+source: []
+hidesubscription: false
+---
+
+<!--
+- [ ] Add image (1920×1080 PNG or JPG) and image-alt
+- [ ] Open a PR against main for a Netlify preview
+-->
+
+It has been a busy last couple of months for [tidymodels.org](https://www.tidymodels.org/).
+The site got a visual refresh,
+the Find pages were rebuilt from scratch,
+every article was modernized to use the base pipe and current parsnip and keras APIs,
+and, maybe most importantly,
+the whole rendering pipeline now keeps itself up to date automatically whenever a tidymodels package hits CRAN.
+Here is a roundup of what changed, grouped by theme.
+
+## A rebuilt Find experience
+
+The Find pages were one of the oldest parts of the site,
+and they were starting to show their age.
+The old DT-based tables were hard to scan and didn't filter cleanly,
+so we [rebuilt them from scratch](https://github.com/tidymodels/tidymodels.org/pull/249) as Quarto custom listings backed by generated `items.yml` files.
+They now have proper faceted multi-select filter dropdowns,
+which makes narrowing down to the model or function you need much faster.
+
+Along the way we filled in coverage that had been missing from search:
+[quantile regression models](https://github.com/tidymodels/tidymodels.org/pull/265),
+[bonsai](https://github.com/tidymodels/tidymodels.org/pull/230),
+and the rest of the tidymodels org packages all made it onto the official package list and into Find.
+We also [fixed the parsnip table's horizontal overflow](https://github.com/tidymodels/tidymodels.org/pull/243)
+and [split the old `make_function_list.R` into separate generators](https://github.com/tidymodels/tidymodels.org/pull/148) so the underlying data is easier to maintain.
+
+## Automatic re-rendering when packages update
+
+This is the deepest change of the year,
+even though it is the least visible.
+The site used to require a manual re-render whenever a tidymodels package was updated on CRAN.
+That was easy to forget,
+and slow when it did happen because every page got re-rendered together.
+The pipeline is now much more targeted.
+
+Every article declares its non-tidymodels package dependencies in [`r-packages:` YAML front matter](https://github.com/tidymodels/tidymodels.org/pull/152),
+and a build script turns that into a package-to-pages map.
+From there, CI knows exactly which pages a given CRAN release could affect.
+
+A scheduled workflow then checks CRAN every weekday morning,
+figures out which packages changed and which pages depend on them,
+[installs only those packages](https://github.com/tidymodels/tidymodels.org/pull/166),
+re-renders only those pages,
+and opens a PR for review (or files an issue if anything fails).
+Contributors can also trigger renders by [commenting `/render` on a PR](https://github.com/tidymodels/tidymodels.org/pull/163),
+which is a big quality-of-life win for anyone who doesn't want to install the full toolchain locally.
+You can see the system at work in the steady drip of bot-authored re-render PRs,
+including package-specific ones for [broom](https://github.com/tidymodels/tidymodels.org/pull/245),
+[parsnip](https://github.com/tidymodels/tidymodels.org/pull/246),
+and [bonsai](https://github.com/tidymodels/tidymodels.org/pull/268).
+
+To keep that daily cadence practical,
+we also audited the longest-running pages and trimmed render time where we could,
+and set up Spark, Java 17, and a cached Keras virtualenv in CI.
+
+## Cleaner, more reproducible output
+
+A surprising amount of churn in rendered output came from things like timestamps and small h2o non-determinism.
+We cleaned up the session-info blocks to [remove the date](https://github.com/tidymodels/tidymodels.org/pull/223) and [other noise](https://github.com/tidymodels/tidymodels.org/pull/168),
+set reproducible seeds for h2o,
+and normalized its output more carefully.
+A re-render now produces a meaningful diff instead of being drowned in cosmetic differences.
+
+## Modernized article code
+
+The articles got a top-to-bottom code refresh.
+Every `%>%` [became `|>`](https://github.com/tidymodels/tidymodels.org/pull/225),
+[deprecated parsnip and recipes functions](https://github.com/tidymodels/tidymodels.org/pull/226) were swapped for their current equivalents,
+and [parsnip engine setters were fully specified](https://github.com/tidymodels/tidymodels.org/pull/227) so they don't break when defaults shift.
+The keras article was [migrated to the new keras3 engine](https://github.com/tidymodels/tidymodels.org/pull/264),
+and the parsnip predictions article, which had been broken for a while,
+was [restored from the old parsnip vignette](https://github.com/tidymodels/tidymodels.org/pull/128).
+
+## Code linking with downlit
+
+Function names in code blocks across the site are now hyperlinked to their documentation with [downlit](https://github.com/tidymodels/tidymodels.org/pull/158).
+The tricky part was that `library(tidymodels)` doesn't get auto-expanded the way `library(tidyverse)` does,
+so a [small post-render script](https://github.com/tidymodels/tidymodels.org/pull/159) seeds the package list explicitly.
+That is what makes `step_*`, `tune()`, and friends light up everywhere.
+
+## Site content and UX
+
+The most visible work this year was a steady stream of design polish.
+We [rebuilt the landing page](https://github.com/tidymodels/tidymodels.org/pull/228) so it actually showcases what tidymodels is and where to start,
+swapped in the [new Posit logo](https://github.com/tidymodels/tidymodels.org/pull/240),
+and moved blog references from the old tidyverse blog to [opensource.posit.co](https://github.com/tidymodels/tidymodels.org/pull/241).
+Hex stickers across the site were [converted from PNG to SVG](https://github.com/tidymodels/tidymodels.org/pull/212) so they stay crisp at any size,
+and the dev articles [got hexes of their own](https://github.com/tidymodels/tidymodels.org/pull/213).
+
+The team listing was [refreshed](https://github.com/tidymodels/tidymodels.org/pull/149) to reflect who is working on tidymodels today,
+and we [reserved image dimensions on the About page](https://github.com/tidymodels/tidymodels.org/pull/250) to fix a layout shift where author photos popped in late.
+The Learn, Books, and Resources pages picked up a batch of smaller fixes:
+[updated Learn categories](https://github.com/tidymodels/tidymodels.org/pull/267)
+and [more feedback UI](https://github.com/tidymodels/tidymodels.org/pull/253) such as hover states on article cards and sidebar links.
+Edgar contributed a dedicated [cheatsheets page](https://github.com/tidymodels/tidymodels.org/pull/153),
+and Julia's long-standing PR to publish the [priorities survey results](https://github.com/tidymodels/tidymodels.org/pull/239) finally landed.
+
+## Behind the scenes
+
+Plenty of repo hygiene rounded out the year.
+The [Quarto config was split](https://github.com/tidymodels/tidymodels.org/pull/191) into local and production profiles,
+fonts are now self-hosted (Lato and Source Code Pro) instead of pulled from Google,
+and the README got a proper contributing section.
+
+Head over to [tidymodels.org](https://www.tidymodels.org/) to see it all in action,
+and if you spot something to improve,
+contributions are very welcome over on [GitHub](https://github.com/tidymodels/tidymodels.org).