[SAC] Barn raising: osgeo.org web site

Committees SAC mailing list
1

Hi All,

Plans to recreate the current OSGeo.org website in a newer version of the Drupal content management system are on the wiki here:

https://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/OSGeo.org_Web_Site_-_2016_Barn_Raising

This topic is also on the agenda for this week’s OSGeo board meeting (Thursday):
agenda: https://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/Board_Meeting_2015-12-10
time: http://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/fixedtime.html?year=2015&month=12&day=10&hour=14&min=0&sec=0%2015.00UTC

Please send replies to the message to discuss**@lists.osgeo.org** and not to the other lists included on this message to prevent the discussion from being split across the discuss, board, sac and webcom lists!

Many thanks,

Ian

P.S. I anticipate that we may not all agree that a manual migration to Drupal 8 is the absolute optimal solution — but please bear in mind that possible upgrades have been in discussion since 2007… We’re looking for a solution that can be easily implemented and meets the main requirements (including removing ad hoc custom PHP and also ensuring solid multilingual support).

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On Thu, Dec 3, 2015 at 12:22 PM, Jeff McKenna <jmckenna@gatewaygeomatics.com> wrote:

Hi Ian,

Thanks for proposing this. I agree, we need a “not invented here”
approach, to make this possible. It is sure time for this upgrade. I
have added your proposal to the next board meeting agenda, Ian could you
also attend that IRC meeting, to help guide this topic? See the exact
time at the top of this page:
https://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/Board_Meeting_2015-12-10

I would also like to see this plan (including the nodes transferred) on
the OSGeo wiki. Could you also start drafting these plans on the OSGeo
wiki, and share that link with everyone?

One big part of this upgrade is the Service Providers page
(http://www.osgeo.org/search_profile), which I believe is made up on
custom PHP. Please include your plans for this in the wiki (or a section
on the wiki for this so we can get proposals/ideas for how to improve this
search tool.

We will of course need to work closely with the SAC committee on this, and
we can share these wiki plans with them, for their approval.

Thanks again for pushing this.

-jeff

Hi All,

With the recent release of Drupal 8, I’d like to suggest we hold a barn
raising event for recreating and re-hosting the main osgeo.org website.

Why continue with Drupal?

  • We need a proven CMS that is easy for all users and doesn’t require lots
    of work to maintain.
    -Drupal 8 was developed to put multilingual capabilities first, a core
    requirement for OSGeo.
  • v8 includes responsive themes designed for mobiles and tablets and is
    engineered to be fast by default.
  • Unlike the OSGeo projects, we need a “not invented here” approach to the
    website where we aim to write little or no code ourselves.

How?

  • The current site has around 1600 nodes. If, for example, 16 people took
    responsibility for 100 nodes each we could manually copy content without
    worrying about automating the migration… therefore no risk of
    transferring anything that’s not public, or of copying across old embedded
    PHP code.
  • A shared google spreadsheet would record which nodes had been
    transferred. We’d transfer newer nodes first and create the correct links
    among the translated content    .
  • The sponsor pages could be created as a custom content type and
    displayed
    using built-in drupal views, allowing sorting, searching etc without any
    custom PHP.
  • SAC could install a vanilla Drupal 8 on a new server and get inital LDAP
    support working. Webcom would take responsibility for content, theming
    etc.
    and discussions via the webcom mailing list.
  • The board would decide when to transfer to new site.

Principals

  • Avoid writing any custom code (which has prevented upgrades in the past)
  • Install minimal contributor modules, ensure any that are used are likely
    to be maintained long term, e.g. ldap
    <https://www.drupal.org/project/ldap>
    module.

Is this something that could be discussed at the next board meeting?

Ian

P.S. The following link provides a good summary of features in Drupal 8:

https://www.acquia.com/sites/default/files/library/attachment/ultimate-guide-drupal-8v3.pdf

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