The Future of kde.org

[Harald Sitter]

On Monday 01 September 2008 03:30:06 Kyle Cunningham wrote:
> Thus, I would like to have kde.org moved to Drupal 6 for several reasons.
>
> 1.  Drupal has a good permissions structure and would make it
> straightforward to have a large number of maintainers.

We have a couple of drupal deployments already (namely Amarok, Digikam and 
SpreadKDE) maybe the responsible persons could share a bit of their experience 

> 2.  Drupal will allow many people, including people who aren't coders to
> help maintain kde.org.  This is especially good because it helps to save
> the time of developers.

This is probably one of the main advantages if we switch to Drupal or any 
other CMS. Currently a lot of potential www contributors/maintainers get 
scared off by having to apply for an SVN account, getting WWW karma, 
understanding capacity...
A CMS _could_ make the kde-www team grow a lot.

> 3.  Drupal has multisite capabilities meaning that many *.kde.org
> websites could be run off of a single Drupal installation.

Makes sense, since most of the subdomains are currently also using capacity.

> 4.  Drupal has support for content and controls in multiple languages,
> making it easier for the KDE community to reach out to people all over
> the world.

We have a couple of individual local KDE websites, currently I think some of 
them are using the KDE approach with theme modifications and the others are 
using homemade solutions. The question here is whether they are willing to 
join the all new kde.org or stick with their current systems.

> 5.  Drupal presents a solution which has a clear upgrade path that is
> well understood by many people.
>
>
> 6.  Getting the support of the Drupal community would be a huge boost to
> KDE on the web.

I guess having an official cooperation/partnership or whatever between KDE and 
Drupal would be a pretty nice promotion advantage :D

> 7.  Drupal would be a solid platform for open collaboration services and
> already has many requisite pieces such as open ID support.

Defenitely needs consideration.

We just had a discussion about this in #kde-www from which I'd like to write a 
summary here:
A migrating is certainly going to be a long and very painful process. We 
probably should go live with a new system at the same time for all parties 
which take part (i.e. www.kde.org + all subdomains which currently use 
capacity + possibly local groups + extragear apps which would like to join as 
well) for promotion and appearance reasons.

This is were the 'long' comes in. Www. and the subdomains which use capacity 
alone are a gigantic bunch of content that needs to be reviewed, migrated, 
updated and/or dumped. Considering some of the local KDE websites want to join 
as well and maybe also Amarok, we are at a very big amount of content.

In any case we would need a lot of people to help, and I really mean _A LOT_ 
here. 
Post-migration we need a good network of maintainers (and again a lot of them) 
to keep the content up-to-date and useful.

Definitely no easy job.

We also have to consider the fact that quite some content on current kde.org 
is based on xml files (e.g. the changelogs get generated from those as well as 
the version information for extragear.kde.org). We should provide ways to keep 
this kind of content in SVN and pull it via Drupal modules into the CMS.

As for the open collaboration services (BCCing kde-services-devel as well ;-) 
[1] it appears that we should do this as a very first step:
<Socceroos> unless we centralise the management of all the separate KDE 
community pieces (like svn, kde developers, kde artists, kde.org, mail lists, 
etc) then making things like open collaboration services useful will be 
extremely difficult to do+maintain.
<Socceroos> open collaboration is going to require the meshing of the different 
sections of the community, which in turn requires the centralisation of 
management or it will quickly become a behemoth mess.

[1] http://freedesktop.org/wiki/Specifications/open-collaboration-services


To sum that up:
* A lot of work
* For a lot of people
* With a lot of technical changes/improvements

In order to make such a migration successful, we need a very good planned 
schedule, a couple of core people who can act as managers and keep things 
going and a lot of volunteers to help.

So let's get started. First things first:
Do we want to switch?
Do we want to switch to Drupal?

Regards,
Harald

P.S. I BCCed amarok-devel at kde.org kde-promo at kde.org digikam-devel at kde.org and 
kde-services-devel at kde.org hoping that none can accidentally replies to all of 
them :)
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 197 bytes
Desc: This is a digitally signed message part.
Url : http://mail.kde.org/pipermail/amarok-devel/attachments/20080901/9e48c561/attachment.sig