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

Mon Apr 25 14:39:43 UTC 2016

On Monday, April 25, 2016 7:20:01 AM CEST Alexandre Courbot wrote:
> On Mon, Apr 25, 2016 at 12:04 AM, Milian Wolff <mail at milianw.de> wrote:
> > 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.
> 
> I don't have any clear suggestion to make here, especially since my
> solution to this problem has been to ditch comments altogether (I came
> to *hate* web comments for the most part). That's maybe not an option
> for KDevelop, although there are many other communication channels
> (KDE forums, etc.) that could replace them. 

Undecided here.

I like the comment section since it usually contains a number of interesting 
comments related to the topic (e.g. on release announcements): People point 
out problems in the release tarballs, or ask for installers on non-Linux 
platforms for this particular release. When pointing people to forums and 
mailing lists the information will be scattered around.

Not sure.

Something to discuss face-to-face in Randa maybe (/me adds a TODO item)

> My intent was to make sure
> that you guys were aware of the options that require less maintainance
> than a full-blown CMS (or in this case, none at all), since there
> seems to be a lack of resources to maintain Drupal.

Drupal isn't the problem, IMO. It's a general lack of interest in maintaining 
and advancing/modernizing the KDevelop website.

And I think we'd still like to aggregate & store developer blog entries on 
kdevelop.org, I don't think that's easily doable with static pages.

Cheers,
Kevin

> The actual matter might be deciding how much you really want comments
> on kdevelop.org. :)
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-- 
Kevin Funk | kfunk at kde.org | http://kfunk.org
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