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

[Milian Wolff]

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!

Thanks

[Aleix Pol]

Post by Milian Wolff
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.

Aleix

[Alexandre Courbot]

Post by Aleix Pol

Post by Milian Wolff
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.

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.

Just for your consideration. :)

Cheers,
Alex.

[Milian Wolff]

Post by Alexandre Courbot

Post by Aleix Pol

Post by Milian Wolff
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
* 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

Post by Alexandre Courbot
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.

Post by Alexandre Courbot
Just for your consideration. :)

Thanks!

[Sven Brauch]

Hey,

The actual matter might be deciding how much you really want comments
on kdevelop.org. :)

Maybe we should really think about that. The occasional "well done"
there is fun to read, but that's about it. The rest of the comments
belongs in the bug tracker or on the mailing list, and having it in the
comments section just leads to nobody seeing it for ages. I just
recently moderated a bunch of comments which had been sitting in the
moderation queue for many weeks.
I think we might even be better off without the comments. Just put a
link to the forum and all is good.

Best,
Sven

[Alexander Zhigalin]

_______________________________________________
KDevelop mailing list
***@kde.org
https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/kdevelop

[Alexandre Courbot]

Also as Sven cleverly pointed out, comments on a project's website
tend to end up as a bug reporting channel, at the expense of the
actual bug tracker. It's easier for users to just post a comment than
read the "report a bug" section, and that's what many naturally end up
doing.

It isn't better to have a bug report in a wrong place instead of no

report at all?

If the reported bug is never triaged and addressed, then it just adds
stress on the developers' shoulders.

Besides a reasonable user will probably look further and find the "Report a
bug" link elsewhere on the page.

[Aleix Pol]

Post by Sven Brauch
Hey,

The actual matter might be deciding how much you really want comments
on kdevelop.org. :)

Maybe we should really think about that. The occasional "well done"
there is fun to read, but that's about it. The rest of the comments
belongs in the bug tracker or on the mailing list, and having it in the
comments section just leads to nobody seeing it for ages. I just
recently moderated a bunch of comments which had been sitting in the
moderation queue for many weeks.
I think we might even be better off without the comments. Just put a
link to the forum and all is good.

+1 makes sense to me.

Aleix

[Milian Wolff]

Post by Aleix Pol

Post by Sven Brauch
Hey,

The actual matter might be deciding how much you really want comments
on kdevelop.org. :)

Maybe we should really think about that. The occasional "well done"
there is fun to read, but that's about it. The rest of the comments
belongs in the bug tracker or on the mailing list, and having it in the
comments section just leads to nobody seeing it for ages. I just
recently moderated a bunch of comments which had been sitting in the
moderation queue for many weeks.
I think we might even be better off without the comments. Just put a
link to the forum and all is good.

+1 makes sense to me.

What do we do with the existing comments?

[Aleix Pol]

Post by Milian Wolff

Post by Aleix Pol

Post by Sven Brauch
Hey,

The actual matter might be deciding how much you really want comments
on kdevelop.org. :)

Maybe we should really think about that. The occasional "well done"
there is fun to read, but that's about it. The rest of the comments
belongs in the bug tracker or on the mailing list, and having it in the
comments section just leads to nobody seeing it for ages. I just
recently moderated a bunch of comments which had been sitting in the
moderation queue for many weeks.
I think we might even be better off without the comments. Just put a
link to the forum and all is good.

+1 makes sense to me.

What do we do with the existing comments?

If I smoked I'd suggest to print them.

IMHO, we should centralize the feedback channels to where we can be,
manpower is limited.

Aleix

[Kevin Funk]

Post by Milian Wolff

Post by Alexandre Courbot

Post by Aleix Pol

Post by Milian Wolff
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
* 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>

Post by Alexandre Courbot
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. :)
_______________________________________________
KDevelop mailing list
https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/kdevelop

[Milian Wolff]

Post by Kevin Funk

Post by Milian Wolff

Post by Alexandre Courbot

Post by Aleix Pol

Post by Milian Wolff
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
* 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>

Post by Alexandre Courbot
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.

True, I forgot about that part. Blog and comment aggregation (both via Atom/
RSS) is a nice addition to our website. What it helps in conveying is that our
project is alive and kicking. But embedding a github-style heatmap could work
as well for that purpose, with a link to phabricator pages for more details...

The developer aggregation could be handled by a separate planet aggregator, if
needed. But that means additional maintenance there then, esp. for the
themeing.

Bye

[Aleix Pol]

Post by Milian Wolff

Post by Kevin Funk

Post by Milian Wolff

Post by Alexandre Courbot

Post by Aleix Pol

Post by Milian Wolff
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
* 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>

Post by Alexandre Courbot
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.

True, I forgot about that part. Blog and comment aggregation (both via Atom/
RSS) is a nice addition to our website. What it helps in conveying is that our
project is alive and kicking. But embedding a github-style heatmap could work
as well for that purpose, with a link to phabricator pages for more details...
The developer aggregation could be handled by a separate planet aggregator, if
needed. But that means additional maintenance there then, esp. for the
themeing.

I agree, RSS is a must for any direction we should take.

Regarding Planet aggregation, there's already different planets being
aggregated within planetkde.org, maybe we could get our own within
planetkde (hence removing the maintenance burden).

Aleix