Create a pkdown site

[GegznaV]

A modern and convenient way to explore R packages and especially examples of functions is pkgdown website of package's documentation. It could be hosted using Github Pages.

Could this kind of website be created for package pls in the near future?

[bhmevik]

I've looked briefly at this now. It should be doable, but I have a couple of issues with it.

• It doesn't support vignettes in Rnw format, and that is what the pls package contains. According to WISH: as_pkgdown() / pkgdown:::package_vignettes() support any vignette format - not just rmarkdown r-lib/pkgdown#781, Hadley is not going to add support for Rnw.
• It only supports NEWS.md, while the pls package has a NEWS.Rd file, and R itself only supports NEWS.Rd (and NEWS). Again, it does not look like support for NEWS.Rd will be implemented: https://github.com/r-lib/pkgdown/issues?utf8=%E2%9C%93&q=NEWS.Rd
  This means that except for providing individual html files for each Rd file in man directory, a pkgdown page (at least out-of-the-box) gives considerably less than the standard CRAN page (https://cran.r-project.org/package=pls). Converting the vignette to md would be a large job (just converting it from pure LaTeX to Rnw was a major undertaking) which I'm unlikely to have time to do. And I'm certainly not going to manually maintain two versions of the news file.
  While these issues are not a total show stopper, I'll have to consider it a bit -- providing a documentation page without the vignette or news file will probably make some users believe the packaga doesn't have them, which is not good.