[QGIS-Developer] Projecta

[Tim Sutton]

Hi Matthias

> On 22 Jun 2018, at 11:39, Matthias Kuhn <matthias at opengis.ch> wrote:
> 
> Hi PSC,
> 
> We have seen some quite nice improvements in the recent past with the
> visual changelog, the certification program and the sponsor map managed
> on projecta.
> 
> I am not sure if changelog.qgis.org is the only DNS entry we have to
> this host, it's at least the one that google delivers as first result here.

> 
> This feels a bit weird because
> 
> - I think the finalized changelog goes to qgis.org, but the name
>   changelog.qgis.org sounds like that's the authoritative one
> 
> - For sponsors it's more or less the same question, there's a list on
>   qgis.org and one on changelog.qgis.org.
> 
> - As far as I know certification is only available on projecta, so at
>   least for this it seems to be the main point of access.
> 
> I wonder what's the roadmap here, having projecta mostly as management
> infrastructure for maintaining sponsorship, feature and certification
> databases or if it's also something that should act as a frontend for
> users. In the second case, are there any plans to move these to
> dedicated subdomains?
> 
> And as a sidenote, it would be nice to have SSL enabled on the webservers :)

Since a few months ago, we added custom domain supports to the ‘projecta’ app we have built. That lets us host all the projects on one server instance but each project registering a custom domain can specify their own project or group of projects to be what is seen when you visit that domain. So while in the past you would see a bunch of different unrelated projects, you now see :

http://changelog.qgis.org -> goes straight to the QGIS projecta project
http://changelog.inasafe.org -> goes to the projecta landing page for InaSAFE (which then lists a few subprojects of InaSAFE)
http://changelog.kartoza.com -> goes to the generic landing page which any new project will be registered on
http://???? -> more to come in future


Although we built this platform based around the things we identified as useful for QGIS, we planned to make it generic enough that it can be used by other projects, with eventually a monetisation scheme (which QGIS will be exempt from) whereby we will charge a small transaction fee on donations, sponsorships, certificates etc. passing through the system. We already spent a LOT of time and money on building the platform and would like to have it funded so it can be sustainable into the future. The monetisation will be on top of the stripe commission fees which to participating projects will probably mean around an 8% overhead on transactions coming through the platform. That is more than the do-it yourself stripe approach but we feel the convenience of the platform makes that a good value proposition.

Everything is projecta is open source so QGIS could conceivably run it on its own infrastructure if you decide you don’t like something we are doing….and Richard already knows how to get an instance up and running….its not too hard.

Richard has already done an integration to automate the sponsorships going into projecta to appear on the QGIS.org sponsors page (via a feed that we provide on projecta for sponsors). We can do this because sponsors can be shown to users as static content.

Likewise for the changelogs there is a feed to grab them from projecta and (with a bit of massaging from Richard) incorporate them into QGIS.org. We probably want to keep this workflow because a) static pages are nice :-) and b) once in sphinx the changelogs can be translated using the same workflows as the rest of the site.

Certification is on projecta and I can’t see it going to a static site right now - In the future maybe when we have views for ‘upcoming courses near you’ and ‘find a training centre’ etc. we could probably pull these over but even that probably isnt worth it. We could probably tweak projecta to allow custom domains for a project’s certification page (e.g. https://certification.qgis.org).

The same for the lessons platform we build (see http://changelog.qgis.org/en/qgis/section/list/ for all the new training materials we have been developing for QGIS) - we could be pulling this over to QGIS.org as static content and then incorporating into translation workflows there. We have also a translation framework for lessons on the platform, but it probably won’t scale well for many many languages.

SSL is on our roadmap for projecta,

We are also going to be rebranding it soon as http://prj.app (nothing to see there yet) with an on ramping process to make it easy for new projects to sign up.

We would be happy to tweak things to include custom domain support for other parts of the app e.g. http://lessons.qgis.org. There are also other interesting things that we built on the platform that never really got used - especially the quorum tool which lets you form teams in a project, make and record decisions (pre-dated loomio) and has a concencus model built in.

For QGIS.org I would suggest to generally keep things as you have it - pull static content onto the site and use projecta as backend where you prepare content. It is a ‘safe’ way to manage things since once content is static, there isnt much that can go wrong and we trade a few moving parts in the content preparation phase for basically no moving parts in the content delivery stage.

Hope that sheds some light on the big picture view of things from project’s side - and hopefully those with other published software will consider using Prj.app in the future to benefit from all the stuff we have built for QGIS.org and to help support us in maintaining the platform….

Regards

Tim



> 
> Thanks
> Matthias
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—








Tim Sutton

Co-founder: Kartoza
Ex Project chair: QGIS.org

Visit http://kartoza.com <http://kartoza.com/> to find out about open source:

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Skype: timlinux
IRC: timlinux on #qgis at freenode.net

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