Moving the wiki

[Brian Proffitt]

----- Original Message -----
> From: "Karsten Wade" <kwade at redhat.com>
> To: infra at ovirt.org
> Sent: Wednesday, October 22, 2014 9:44:00 PM
> Subject: Re: Moving the wiki
> 
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> On 10/22/2014 11:19 AM, Michael Scherer wrote:
> > I still think the easiest way is to host our own setup.
> 
> Two notes:
> 
> * While there is definitely increased work for the Infra team in
> bringing it back from OpenShift, it also takes away some of the work
> being done to keep the OpenShift instance running well.
> 
> * We can always move back about as easily, such as when service
> features are at parity.
> 
> One of my concerns about OpenShift is that it now doesn't fit into the
> rest of the Infra scheme. If we're maintaining everything with
> Foreman/Puppet, for example, wouldn't it be a bit easier to bring the
> wiki server in to the same scheme?
> 
> It's like the problems we have with linode01.ovirt.org -- it's outside
> of the rest of the process Infra uses, so it's more likely problems
> will build up there until they get noticed.
> 
> - - Karsten
> - --
> Karsten 'quaid' Wade        .^\          CentOS Doer of Stuff
> http://TheOpenSourceWay.org    \  http://community.redhat.com
> @quaid (identi.ca/twitter/IRC)  \v'             gpg: AD0E0C41
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At Barak's request, I wanted to outline what should be the next phase for oVirt.org, which may render this discussion moot. At least, the discussion of shifting away from OpenShift, based on MediaWiki. We may want to migrate away for other reasons, but this will probably not be one of them.

oVirt.org is currently a MediaWiki site, and as such has a lot of (expected) user collaboration. But that collaboration is not terribly organized, and has no version control whatsoever. This makes it impossible for a group like Content Services to scrape documentation content into their process, and the end-user experience is also sub-optimal.

As an alternative, the OSAS design team wants oVirt.org to move over to Middleman-based when we revamp the site later this year. This would mean that content would be stored on GitHub as markdown (MD) or HTML files, and then Middleman would be used to edit content locally as well as deploy onto the production site. This is currently how projectatomic.io handles 

Clearly, moving from a wiki to something static like a Middleman/GitHub solution is drastic, but Garrett LeSage and Tuomas Kuosmanen have come up with an idea: prose.io is a third-party WYSIWYG editor that ties directly in to GitHub repos. We will have links on the new oVirt.org site for each page or section of a page that would open up the source content for that page/section in prose.io, where a user could then edit the content and save it with a simple GUI that would bypass the complexity of git commands. Depending on the user's permissions, the edited content would be deployed immediately on the site or held as a pull request for later approval.

An alternative to prose.io that Garrett has also proposed is bolting on an admin UI for editing blog posts using various existing components (mainly for rich editing), so the entire thing could be done via a browser-based interface (only available when running in development). 

>From a user perspective, the experience is no different than using a wiki. If we use prose.io, will have to have a GitHub account, but for our users, that's not much or a hurdle, since they would have to have a MediaWiki account on oVirt.org anyway. 

There are issues to narrow down with this plan (like how do oVirt.org users add new pages?), but so far, it feels like a good solution and a positive step away from MediaWiki.

Peace,
Brian

-- 
Brian Proffitt

Community Liaison
oVirt
Open Source and Standards, Red Hat - http://community.redhat.com
Phone: +1 574 383 9BKP
IRC: bkp @ OFTC