Drupal Help Needed: Website needs to be updated to Drupal 7/8

[Milian Wolff]

On Sonntag, 24. April 2016 14:45:14 CEST Alexandre Courbot wrote:
> On Sun, Feb 28, 2016 at 10:08 AM, Aleix Pol <aleixpol at kde.org> wrote:
> > On Fri, Feb 26, 2016 at 7:48 PM, Milian Wolff <mail at milianw.de> wrote:
> >> Hey all,
> >> 
> >> our KDevelop website is still running on Drupal 6 which is now officially
> >> unsupported! We must act _now_ to update the website to Drupal 7.
> >> 
> >> Is anyone available to help in the effort? Otherwise I'll try to tackle
> >> this task myself. I'd rather spent the time fixing KDevelop of course
> >> ;-) So if someone in our user base has experience in that area - please
> >> step forward!> 
> > Hi Milian,
> > Thanks a lot! I wouldn't know where to start from.
> > 
> > Would it be possible to port it  less customized so we can upgrade
> > whenever they release? For my blog I use wordpress and I haven't had
> > issues with upgrades. I understand the needs might be different, but
> > nowadays our website is little more than news and links to the wikis.
> 
> Sorry, this is an old thread but since I am in the same situation (old
> websites running Drupal 6) I thought I might share my experience.
> 
> Kdevelop.org seems to be mostly (entirely?) a collection of static
> pages. Have you considered moving to a static page generator? The
> advantages are numerous:
> 
> * No need for PHP/MySQL, data is easy-to-read text files
> * No upgrade stress, no need to apply security fixes on the server
> beyond Apache/Nginx
> * Edits are simple & clean, done using Markdown and pushed to a git server
> * Website is faster and more responsive since the pages don't need to
> be generated
> 
> The only drawback I can see is that the data needs to be ported to the
> static generator. In my case I only have a handful of pages so I just
> copy/pasted the content's HTML into text files, but in the case of
> KDevelop you may want to use one of the Drupal converters that exist
> for most projects (or maybe just write your own).
> 
> I have chosen to use Hugo (https://gohugo.io/) but there are many
> others that are probably equally suited to the task.
> 
> The biggest advantage to the switch is that you don't have to care
> about the servers anymore. Is my server up-to-date? Will MySQL restart
> properly after I upgrade? Oh no, I have to do a manual upgrade of
> Drupal again, including putting the site off-line and running the
> update scripts... All that is over. Git pull, edit, git push, and a
> server hook regenerates the pages. Less time spent administrating,
> more time spent doing actual development.

I thought a lot about this, and I still think about doing this for my personal 
website. And maybe in the long term also for the KDevelop website.

The biggest issue I had which refrained me from ditching Drupal altogether was 
the commenting feature:

> Dynamic things such as comments can be delegated to Javascript and
> external entities (like disqus), but it is also possible to host your
> own comments server.

Disqus is not an option for a KDE website, imo, as they own the content and 
place quite some burden on the commenters. The only feasible alternative would 
be a self-hosted one on KDE infrastructure, but then we'd have to spent quite 
some time in migrating the drupal comments to the new infrastructure. And 
looking at the options for self-hosted ones, I found no clear answer as to 
which one to pick. Isso, Hashover, ... none of them seems to be "really" big 
and thus guaranteed to be around for long. If you have any suggestions as to 
what to use, we might want to reconsider.

> Just for your consideration. :)

Thanks!

-- 
Milian Wolff
mail at milianw.de
http://milianw.de
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