Coming (Very) Soon - New ovirt.org Website & Deprecated Wiki

[Mikey Ariel]

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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outdated, and incorrect information.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


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