Page Templates experience contains meaningless messages, outright lies, 404s, and complete disappointment

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Page Templates experience contains meaningless messages, outright lies, 404s, and complete disappointment. The templates should really be removed until they work in a reasonable way.

Steps to reproduce:

  1. Create a project on GitLab.com
  2. Select the Jekyll pages template
  3. Wait for the project to appear
  4. Run a CI/CD job

Problem 1: WTF is the README telling me?

The README contains the following text:

1. CSS is missing! That means two things:

Either that you have wrongly set up the CSS URL in your templates, or
your static generator has a configuration option that needs to be explicitly
set in order to serve static assets under a relative URL.

Since I just created a site from a template, I neither set up the CSS URL, nor did I configure my static generator, so neither of these suggestions applies. (Besides, it's really weird to have a "1." without any other numbers.)

Problem 2: Why are you "Congratulating" me when it's broken?

So I wait for the CI job to finish; that doesn't take long. Then I go to Settings--> Pages to get the URL of my site. It says:

Congratulations! Your pages are served under:

... and a URL. Great! I click the URL and get a 404.

The page you're looking for could not be found.

Literally, that is the experience of using a Pages template for the first time.

Not only does the "Congratulations" message tell a lie, but the documentation does too:

Once the pipeline has finished successfully, find the link to visit your website from your project’s Settings > Pages ... Your website is then visible on your domain

Problem 3: The site is beyond ugly

Once the site does appear (it takes about 15-20 minutes, which I only know because I asked on Slack), it's missing CSS and looks terrible. Even as a fairly technical person, I have no idea how to get any CSS to appear (remember that cryptic message?) so I give up. And I'm a GitLab Solution Architect! I suspect any customers would have given up long ago :-(

I'm not sure whether this is a Manage or Release issue so tagging both.

/cc @cstasik @valexieva

Edited by 🤖 GitLab Bot 🤖