KDE.org; Drupal to Wordpress

[Ken Vermette]

Hello everyone;

I have fairly large update on the kde.org site progress, and as I'm
planning a change in course I wanted to run it by everyone;

Instead of Drupal 8 I'm switching to Wordpress for kde.org +1. The Drupal 8
design will be discontinued, and instead I will update the Drupal 7
Neverland theme with responsive header/footers plus a more Aetheric design.
This will directly service the Akademy and Dot websites (and others which I
may be forgetting), and will be done shortly after the Wordpress design is
ready. If there are Drupal websites on the KDE network with maintainers
potentially wishing to switch to Wordpress, I will set aside time to move
them if desired.

The main driving factor behind this is that the work I've done with Drupal
8 is nowhere near the acceptable level of quality I demand for kde.org.
Simply put I'm not a huge fan of how Drupal assets are structured/built,
and it's been showing in my work despite the best of intentions. I won't
say Drupal isn't capable, but it has been slowly strangling my motivation
to do a good job.

I'd be remissed if I didn't mention that Drupal was chosen as part of a
group discussion. The biggest factors for picking Drupal were the
out-of-box features it had, and that Drupal is "better for big sites".
While it does have everything we need out-of-box for integration, it
neglects that for either WP or Drupal we need to write several
extensions/modules to serve our special purposes, and I can see much better
results in my work with Wordpress. I know how to do all of this with
Wordpress easily, and there are only a few 3rd-party Wordpress plugins we
need for our demands from Drupal; ldap/kidentity, caching, and translation
are the biggies. These are readily available and well-maintained.

For the past two days I've taken Jonathan's Aether fork of the KDE Espania
theme and have begun updates to prepare it for use on kde.org. Already I'm
getting results that are not only promising  - but exciting. I earnestly
believe that we'll have a better end-result in faster time taking this
route. For the work already done for Drupal 8, in all honesty, not much of
value is being lost. If you wish to see some of the preliminary work,
Jonathan's blog at http://jriddell.org/ is already showing some of the
early work, and I'm regularly updating the aether-wordpress repo with
regular developments.

If there are any issues or concerns I will be happy to address them.

Cheers!
 - Ken
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