OSGeo Portal Site

This page is intended to document issues, policies and plans with regard to transitioning to the new Drupal based CMS as the OSGeo front end.

= New Site =

The site currently lives at:

http://frot.org/osgeo/portal/

It is expected that we would point www.osgeo.org at this at some point when we are ready to transition.

= General Plan =

The general plan is to move from using the CollabNet "www.osgeo.org" project as the public web presence for OSGeo to using a Drupal based CMS. In the short term this will not affect other osgeo.org sub-domains such as those for projects (MapGuide, etc), nor for committee work which will remain the same. It is anticipated that other items hosted on the CollabNet infrastructure will eventually be transitioned to new homes though that is a longer term issue.

= Issues =

Content Migration

 * We need to port over content. Apparently this can mostly be done by pasting our existing content/* HTML files into Drupal, though various details need to be worked out and we need to pick a point at which we would stop updating the old web site and complete the transition.
 * We need to update the News Queue process for announcements on the Drupal site.

mloskot's been thinking hard about automating migration of content both from flat files and from this mediawiki install - for pages here that really should become more 'official'. his linkdump:


 * http://drupal.org/project/devel
 * http://drupal.org/node/77352
 * http://drupal.org/node/62954
 * http://drupal.org/node/68153#comment-127897

LDAP and membership

 * We need a mechanism for new users to join the web site and for this to update the LDAP backend database. Currently the drupal site is using the LDAP database in read-only fashion (as far as I know). This work might be integrated with the Membership Application project.
 * At transition we will need to broadly explain the issues with regard to distinct userids for the main web site (and all non-CN stuff), and the CN sub-sites like mapguide, and the committee websites.

Hosting

 * What system will we be running the portal off?  Perhaps an OSU Open Source Lab system?  Or a Telascience system?


 * We have a vhost now available at osgeo.osuosl.org - details of how we can get stuff installed onto it are being worked out - updates as they happen.

Endless arguments about Plone/Drupal

 * How certain are we that Drupal is the right CMS for us? John Graham notes that it has performance issues and is stuck using old versions of some components (like it won't work with PHP5).


 * Drupal 4.7 is php5. See also the irc discussion about this http://logs.qgis.org/osgeo/%23osgeo.2006-08-15.log from 09:44

= Policies =


 * Should we try to retain the existing heirarchy as much as possible? ie. content/foundation/faq.html  If the paths remain the same it will greatly reduce "link breakage" issues.
 * WebCom is responisible for the content, and content management policy.
 * SAC is responsible for maintaining the software, and host system.