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

[Kyle Mandli]

At the scipy conference this year there were a number of people who expressed interest in moving the scipy.org website off of the current server and migrate away from using MoinMoinWiki.  It turns out there have been a number of attempts at this over the past couple of years but nothing has ever stuck (as can be seen in the github org page).  

After discussing a number of approaches it sounds like the best strategy is one similar to what IPython and many other packages are using, namely using github pages and sphinx.  The plan would be:

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).

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).

3) Trac Projects - Numpy is in the process (or so we thought) of moving all the trac issues to github issues and as far as we are aware represents really the last reason these trac projects are still being used. Once this is done we can dispense with these as well. The scipy trac pages have not been moved at all and would also have to be done. These represent some effort but the website could make the transition before this is complete anyway.

4) Anything else?

I am hoping that we can move the content quickly and set up the system first to get it off the ground and update the pages as we can.  Hopefully we can get something going quickly and avoid the fates of previous attempts at this.

Kyle