[Board] Barn raising: osgeo.org web site

[Ian Edwards]

Hi All,

With the recent release of Drupal 8, I'd like to suggest we hold a barn
raising event for recreating and re-hosting the main osgeo.org website.

Why continue with Drupal?

- We need a proven CMS that is easy for all users and doesn't require lots
of work to maintain.
-Drupal 8 was developed to put multilingual capabilities first, a core
requirement for OSGeo.
- v8 includes responsive themes designed for mobiles and tablets and is
engineered to be fast by default.
- Unlike the OSGeo projects, we need a "not invented here" approach to the
website where we aim to write little or no code ourselves.

How?

- The current site has around 1600 nodes.  If, for example, 16 people took
responsibility for 100 nodes each we could manually copy content without
worrying about automating the migration... therefore no risk of
transferring anything that's not public, or of copying across old embedded
PHP code.
- A shared google spreadsheet would record which nodes had been
transferred. We'd transfer newer nodes first and *create the correct links
among the translated content*.
- The sponsor pages could be created as a custom content type and displayed
using built-in drupal views, allowing sorting, searching etc without any
custom PHP.
- SAC could install a vanilla Drupal 8 on a new server and get inital LDAP
support working. Webcom would take responsibility for content, theming etc.
and discussions via the webcom mailing list.
- The board would decide when to transfer to new site.

Principals
- Avoid writing any custom code (which has prevented upgrades in the past)
- Install minimal contributor modules, ensure any that are used are likely
to be maintained long term, e.g. ldap <https://www.drupal.org/project/ldap>
module.

Is this something that could be discussed at the next board meeting?

Ian

P.S. The following link provides a good summary of features in Drupal 8:

https://www.acquia.com/sites/default/files/library/attachment/ultimate-guide-drupal-8v3.pdf
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