homepage_relaunch/README.md

CipherCell homepage relaunch

Static site for www.ciphercell.de, built with Astro. Design foundation: CLAUDE.md (European deep-tech minimalism: warm paper, one neo-grotesque, hairlines, no accent colour).

Run

npm install
npm run dev       # http://localhost:4321
npm run build     # static output in dist/
npm run preview   # serve dist/
npm run check     # Astro + TypeScript check

Where things live

Path	Purpose
src/styles/tokens.css	Every colour, type step, spacing, radius and duration. Components use only these.
src/styles/base.css	Font faces, reset, focus ring, primitives (.container, .grid, .section, .prose, .link, .button).
src/i18n/ui.ts	All interface copy, English and German, one object per language with the same shape.
src/data/team.ts	Team members, roles, portraits, links.
src/content/insights/*.md	Insights posts (content collection). Front matter: title, date, lang, category, readingTime, author, cover.
src/components/home/*	One file per home section, in page order: Hero, Manifesto, Method (with MethodDiagram), Stages (with GridObject), Sectors, Proof, Quote, Insights, Contact.
src/components/home/GridObject.astro	The wireframe objects on the stage and product cards (sphere, cube, plane, wave, steps, nested, stack). Geometry is computed at build time; single stroke in --ink. Each drawing is laid out by hand, so the viewBox is derived from the points as they are emitted, not assumed: a square centred on the drawing, padded for the stroke. A new kind can therefore never be clipped, and the card gives the drawing the flexible row so it sits centred between title and body.
src/components/home/MethodDiagram.astro	The four-stage loop, wide and tall compositions. Labels come from ui.method.stages.
src/components/verifier/*	The CipherVerifier product page, in page order: Hero (line burst), Intro (image band), HowItWorks (five group cards, one schematic each; on wide screens the heading is sticky and the cards stack under it as you scroll), Cards, Facts, Outro.
src/components/verifier/diagrams.ts	The five schematics as data: a hand-placed wide layout and an auto-generated tall spine per group. Schematic.astro renders either. Labels come from ui.verifier.how.groups; the tuple shape is in types.ts. Every element carries the group of the node it belongs to, which drives the hover focus and the draw-in order.
src/scripts/reveal.ts	Marks [data-animate] drawings as drawn once they scroll into view. The drawings' own CSS turns that into the plotter-style reveal, wide screens only, off under prefers-reduced-motion.
scripts/*.mjs	Review tooling: shot.mjs (full page), scroll-shots.mjs (viewport by viewport), tabs-test.mjs (keyboard test for the sectors tabs), contact-sheet.mjs. Need npx astro preview --port 4322.
src/pages/_*.astro	Shared page bodies. index.astro and de/index.astro render _Home.astro with a lang prop, and so on.
src/assets/images/	Source images. Astro emits AVIF with a WebP fallback and explicit dimensions.
public/fonts/	Self-hosted Inter Tight variable (latin, latin-ext).
public/video/	The home hero's background loop, MP4 and WebM. Shipped as-is; Astro does not process video.

Routes

/, /cipherverifier, /team, /insights, /insights/<slug>, /imprint, /privacy, /404 and the same under /de. hreflang alternates and a sitemap are generated. The language switch sits in the footer.

Things the host has to provide

• Contact form. The form posts first_name, last_name, email, message and a honeypot field website to POST /contact, as the current site does. The handler is server-side and not part of this static build.
• Matomo. The privacy page links to the existing opt-out on cipher.uber.space. The tracking snippet itself is not included; add it in src/layouts/Base.astro if analytics should continue.

Adding a post

Create src/content/insights/<slug>.md with the front matter used in xg-aloe-user-forum.md. Put the cover image in src/assets/images/ and reference it with a relative path. The three newest posts appear on the home page automatically.

The hero video

The home hero plays public/video/hero-plant.mp4 / .webm behind the headline, over the plant-at-dusk.jpg still. The still is the video's own first frame, so it carries the hero until the video is ready and stays put for anyone who never gets one.

The video is only fetched when it will be seen: not under prefers-reduced-motion, not on saveData, and not below 48rem, where a 21:9 frame would be cropped to a sliver for the most expensive bytes. The sources are attached by script rather than in the markup, so nothing is requested otherwise. A blocked autoplay also just leaves the still in place.

The source clip was generated with Magnific (Kling 2.5, 10 s, from the hero still as its start frame, https://www.magnific.com/app/creation/5jPaI3qKxe). scripts/encode-hero-video.sh turns a clip into the looping file: it plays forward, then backward, so the loop point cannot be seen, and encodes 1920-wide H.264 and VP9. A 20-second loop lands at 862 KB and 472 KB. To replace it:

FFMPEG=/path/to/ffmpeg ./scripts/encode-hero-video.sh source.mp4 public/video/hero-plant 1920

Keep the first frame of any replacement equal to plant-at-dusk.jpg, or replace both together.

Imagery

The mast at dusk (mast-at-dusk.jpg) is the one documentary photograph from the old site; it remains the cover of the first post. The five other scene images were generated with Magnific (Seedream 5 Pro) on 18 September 2026 in a desaturated documentary style, because no real photography existed:

File	Used in	Magnific creation
plant-at-dusk.jpg	Hero	https://www.magnific.com/app/creation/DoQZmiipcl
engineer-glass.jpg	Method section	https://www.magnific.com/app/creation/3zdScUIREY
sector-5g.jpg	Sectors, tab 1	https://www.magnific.com/app/creation/s7ZQP52l8e
sector-substation.jpg	Sectors, tab 2	https://www.magnific.com/app/creation/yi0r27vPW9
sector-datacentre.jpg	Sectors, tab 3	https://www.magnific.com/app/creation/eIHAvetdqL

They are placeholders in the sense of the brief: swap them for the company's own documentary photography when it exists, keeping the same file names and the img-doc treatment. The grid objects on the stage cards were prototyped as a Magnific sheet (https://www.magnific.com/app/creation/aFsD5crfSh) and then rebuilt as procedural SVG so the stroke matches the rest of the site.

Product page

/cipherverifier describes the pipeline in product_repo/monocipher (mounted for reference, ignored by git). Everything on the page was read from that repository on 18 September 2026:

• The five stages and their order come from orchestrator/pipeline_plan.py.
• The seventeen analysers are rayfusion's built-in plugins plus converters; the fourteen languages are the Technology enum in rayfusion/plugins/base.py. The security profile is described in docs/rayfusion-rule-policy.md.
• The two-stage classification, escalation rules, budgets and replay-validated cache are from docs/polygraph-classification-pipeline.md.
• 970 is the number of entries in sarifcombiner/cwe_information.json.
• SBOM merging (Syft and cdxgen, package-URL deduplication, CycloneDX 1.6) is spectograph/backend, Dependency-Track upload and the ephemeral container are deptrace/commands.
• Git providers, archive upload, CI webhook, scoped settings, live pipeline, PDF report and artefacts are the cipherverifier Django app; the installer is cvm.

When the product changes, update ui.verifier (copy and diagram labels) and, if a stage or tool is added, the layouts in diagrams.ts. All five schematics are on the page; scroll-shots.mjs renders them for review.

Interaction and motion

Three islands of script: the mobile navigation toggle in Header.astro, the sectors tabs in Sectors.astro (src/scripts/tabs.ts: ARIA tablist, arrow keys, Home and End), and the reveal observer used by the product page's drawings.

Motion on the product page, all of it on wide screens: the hero's seventeen lines draw in on load and meet in one point (off under prefers-reduced-motion); hovering a node in a schematic dims everything that does not belong to it. The drawings themselves do not animate.

The "How CipherVerifier works" cards are position: sticky with a growing top offset, so they stack into a deck under the pinned heading. Every card has the same height, bound to the viewport and capped at 37rem, and the drawing fills what the text leaves, so a card always fits and fully covers the one beneath it. The page snaps to each card (scroll-snap-type: y proximity on the root while this component is on the page, scroll-snap-stop: always) via invisible anchors placed at each card's natural position: snapping to the sticky cards themselves would create phantom snap points at the current offset in Chrome. The pinned bar carries one dot per card; the filled one is the card currently on top, and each dot links to its card. A small script sets --covered on each card as the next one slides over it (the card darkens under an opaque veil) and moves the filled dot. The heading is pinned inside a track that ends one card before the deck does, so heading and deck leave the screen together. Phones get the same drawings in a plain flow without any of this. This goes beyond the home page's single load moment on purpose, at the client's request; the home page is unchanged. Without JavaScript every sector panel and its image is shown in full; the html.js class set in Base.astro switches to one at a time.