-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA256 In the past months we've been working on upgrading the oVirt project infrastructure, to better support the community contributions. One of the main platforms for our user documentation, release management content, and community content has been the MediaWiki site that you all know as ovirt.org. Most of us are familiar with the wiki site format, with all its advantages and disadvantages. After several years of serving the community, I'm happy to announce that we are very near to completing a full upgrade of the website infrastructure from a wiki site to a static site, source-controlled on GitHub and authored in Markdown. This email is the pre-launch announcement, as we are reaching the final stages of the migration, and there are a few actions that might affect your work on website content in the meantime. Why migrate the website ======================= As mentioned, wiki sites provide an open and flexible content editing platform. Unfortunately, as the site grows the content becomes quite difficult to manage and curate, resulting in lots of obsolete, outdated, and incorrect information. By moving to a source-controlled repository and implementing GitHub's contribution workflow, we strive to ease the work of maintaining an up-to-date content site, employ a peer-review process for changes, and standardize the authoring markup language to lower the contribution barrier. The Middleman framework (Ruby-based static site generator) was chosen based on observing successful implementation of other open-source community websites, such as OpenStack RDO, Project Atomic, and Gluster. What we did so far ================== When we started the migration, our Web design team exported all of the wiki content from the old website and converted it to MD files. They also set up the website config flow, auto-deploy, and upgraded the look-and-feel of the website. We then initiated a content review effort as well as a UX review for the new website in a smaller forum, which caught most of the critical issues with the new website and helped us get the new format to a place where we can release the website in a near-GA/public-beta format. Yesterday (Wednesday Feb 17) we exported the website one more time and currently we're running a diff on all the files that changed since the initial export was done, to make sure we grab all the updates and the latest content before we launch the new website. What is about to happen ======================= Today we are initiating a **wiki freeze**, which means the old MediaWiki site will become read-only. This is to ensure that all of our diff scripts reflect the most current state of the content on the website, and that we don't lose any content in the transition. Barring any unexpected blockers, we will port the ovirt.org domain to point to the new website and open the new website for contributions on **Monday February 22** or earlier. What do you need to do right now ================================ If you have any wiki pages that you're actively editing, please don't save them to the old MediaWiki site, and hold onto your pending changes until we send the happy launch email. We will also include instructions on how to contribute/edit/add content to the new website, but in general the workflow will be aligned with the standard GitHub best practices (clone-edit-commit-pullrequest), so you can utilize all of the git commands that you already know or work directly within the GitHub web editor. I'd like to thank all of the people who were involved with this migration so far, ovirt.org is a big website with lots of content and it was no small task to upgrade it. Please feel free to ping me on- or off-list if you have any questions about the next steps, and expect a happy launch email soon! Cheers, Mikey - -- Mikey Ariel Community Lead, oVirt www.ovirt.org "To be is to do" (Socrates) "To do is to be" (Jean-Paul Sartre) "Do be do be do" (Frank Sinatra) Mobile: +420-702-131-141 IRC: mariel / thatdocslady Twitter: @ThatDocsLady