OSGeo.org Web Site - 2016 Barn Raising

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With the recent release of Drupal 8, it has been suggested that 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. Plans to automate the migration have currently been shelved in favour of this easy-to-achieve approach.
  • A shared google spreadsheet would record which nodes had been transferred. Link to be added here. We'd transfer newer nodes first and create the correct links among the translated content.
  • The service providers 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 the "barn raising" including content, theming etc. and discussions via the webcom mailing list.
  • The OSGeo 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 module.

Requirements

  • Automated migration of content from current site
  • Duplicate essential functionality
  • Migrate the service providers page (which currently includes custom PHP)
  • Solid multilingual support
  • Provide interface for users to reset a password, or get a password reminder for their OSGeo user ID
  • ...

Software Evaluations

Background

  • Drupal Upgrade Plan - Wolf's fall 2007 plan to upgrade Drupal to 5.3.
  • October 2013 - WebCom began discussing and investigating rebuild options for the main Drupal website (this wiki page created).
  • November 2015 - Drupal 8 released with built-in views and multilingual support.

Clean Up

  • Web VM is running a partial port of the existing site under the URL http://www2.osgeo.org/ (remove)
  • Ensure other hosted multisites in the same old drupal instance are no longer in use
  • Archive old site
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