[SciPy-Dev] SciPy.org Website Move and Redesign

[Kevin Dunn]

On Wed, Jul 25, 2012 at 5:59 PM, Pauli Virtanen <pav at iki.fi> wrote:

> Kyle Mandli <kyle.mandli <at> gmail.com> writes:
> [clip]
> > 1) Mailing lists - Leave these as there's a lot of content there
> > and we are worried about losing history and users if we even
> > attempted to move this (plus we don't have a good alternative).
>
> Mailing lists are going to be needed. They don't necessarily need to
> be hosted on the current scipy.org machine, but it's probably best not to
> touch what has been working reliably.
>
> > 2) Scipy.org (and numpy.org) - Move the content to a repository under
> the
> > Scipy organization on github that would contain a sphinx representation
> > of the content that people can make pull requests to. There would be
> > another repository that the built content would then be pushed to and
> > that github would show as the website. David Warde-Farley has made
> > an attempt at converting many of the scipy pages over to sphinx but it
> > was never used (https://github.com/dwf/scipy-website). I noticed there
> > were a few attempts at this a while ago (> 2 years).
>
> Note that the scipy.github.com site is up with a Git repo set up at
> https://github.com/scipy/scipy.org-new/
> Similarly, numpy.scipy.org site has already moved to Github.
>
> I would see these repos as the central point for any further work.
> David's work is not merged there, but it could be merged (where
> applicable --- some of the content in scipy.org is outdated).
>
> > 3) Trac Projects - Numpy is in the process (or so we thought)
> [clip]
>
> I think the trac projects are a separate issue --- web site redesign
> can either precede or come after what is done with Trac.
>
> IMO, one of the first steps to do is to design a website layout
> skeleton that can be used appropriately on scipy.org, and daughter
> sites, docs.scipy.org, scipy-central.org, etc. This does not have
> to be in Sphinx format at first, just plain HTML+whatever, it's easy
> to hack in later. It also doesn't have to be great, but it does have
> to exist, and one has to think a bit about how and where to put the
> navigation tools.
>
> The amount of relevant "official" content on scipy.org is actually
> not very big, I think.
>
> The main issue is more on what to do with the Cookbook/Topical software
> sections, which in my opinion are not very well-suited to a
> Sphinx-generated static site. Why this hasn't moved forwards is
> probably largely due to not reaching a decision on what actually
> to do with this material.
>
> The current best bet as a replacement (apart from keeping these in Moin)
> would probably be scipy-central.org --- which I'm sure would also benefit
> greatly from additional love. Enthusiastic Django-capable people might be
> interested to take a look at improving it.
>
> --
> Pauli Virtanen


Hi everyone, the scipy-central.org "maintainer" here; in inverted commas,
because I've been doing no maintenance over the past 12 to 18 months.

I'd like to offer all the  scipy-central.org material over to the community
to keep going with it and improve it. I expected to have time to do it
myself, but new jobs and a different career path have prevented me from
implementing improvements that Pauli and several others have proposed in
the past.

This might be a good time to consider the issue, even just from a branding
perspective, to get it all looking coherent.

If anyone wants to get back to me on this, I can pass over

1. Some/all of the domain names (those not transferred I will let lapse on
the next renewal in June 2013)

scipy-central.org(DNS)
scpyce.org(DNS)
scipy-central.com(MX) Forward ( http://scipy-central.org )
scipy-central.net(MX) Forward ( http://scipy-central.org )
scipycentral.com(MX) Forward ( http://scipy-central.org )
scipycentral.net(MX) Forward ( http://scipy-central.org )
scipycentral.org(MX) Forward ( http://scipy-central.org )
scpyce.com(MX) Forward ( http://scpyce.org )
scpyce.net(MX) Forward ( http://scpyce.org )

2. all Django code, media files, templates, CSS and HTML, including
detailed instructions on how to install and use it are already at
https://github.com/kgdunn/SciPyCentral  Please take a look at this to judge
the complexity of the move.
3. backup scripts: local and off-site
4. the PostgreSQL database [23Mb]
5. monthly backup snapshots going back to July 2011, when the site started
[450Mb]
6. the Google Analytics account (not sure how to transfer this)
7. the original artwork files for the media

There are some interesting page hit and search analytics in raw data (item
5) and from Google (item 6) that someone might want to look at.

I currently host the site on Webfaction. The new owner(s) will require a
similar unix-type server with:
* Python and Django,
* webserver (e.g. Apache, or nginx),
* ability to email for account creation, password resets and submission
confirmation
* rsync for remote backup,
* and other miscellaneous utilities: South, Pygments, Sphinx, Haystack
search with Xapian, PIL, etc

The new owner(s) will also inherit 2 pull requests and 45 issues on
the above-mentioned Github site. Other proposals made in the Scipy-Dev
mailing lists over the past year also exist.

I'm in no rush to hand it over; just putting it out there that someone or
some group more capable and with more time can definitely do a better job
of it than me.

Let me know how the community wants to proceed: please let's keep the
discussion public so everyone can contribute.

Kevin
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