Website migration plan 2019

This page is a first draft roadmap of priorities for the migration from our current CMSMS website (grass.osgeo.org) to Wordpress (staging.grass.osgeo.org) a Hugo/git based solution.

Why a new Website

First impressions is usually the influence that gives the biggest effect and our current CMSMS website is getting completely dated and non-attractive. Therefore, to redesign GRASS GIS website is of high priority for the project. Moreover, the current site is pretty hard to maintain and most of the work is done by one or two persons. This becomes a pretty heavy task in occasions. Most importantly, the old CMSMS template is not responsive, i.e., not mobile friendly, which prevents GRASS GIS users and especially potential new users to browse related contents on mobile. This is nowadays an important drawback as compared with other projects and proprietary options.

To enable more people to contribute and contents to be more discoverable and easy to browse, a complete redesign with different technology is planned. Particularly, we consider static website design through HUGO which has several assets over Sphinx, including more web design freedom and many responsive theme available to build on. Moreover, content can be written in Markdown which is much simpler than HTML. We plan to host the site on a git-flavored instance as well, so contributions are significantly eased as compared with the current CMSMS.

For these reasons, we believe it’s imperative to refresh our website in line with recent design trends, technological advancements and search engine algorithms. In this way, we are confident that more people will contribute to keep it alive with blog posts and examples as well as with maintenance. Moreover, GRASS GIS contents will be more discoverable for the newcomers, which we hope will then benefit the whole OSGeo community.

Technology

• a Hugo/git based solution
• Code at: https://github.com/OSGeo/grass-website
• ongoing deployment at staging.grass.osgeo.org

Next meeting

• Sunday 29th of March 2020, at:
  • https://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/meetingdetails.html?year=2020&month=3&day=29&hour=18&min=0&sec=0&p1=37&p2=48&p3=195&p4=51&p5=671&p6=207
  • Virtual Meeting in https://meet.jit.si/grass-website

Desired content

• ...
• ... your ideas here (but please check also below for existing content)

Expected workload

• Research and planing (gathering information about project, users, existing content, type of media...)
• Solution design (creating wireframes, sitemaps and user workflows)
• Solution setup (local Hugo install, templates and base layouts)
• Web design (HTML and CSS to integrate the GRASS GIS branding)
• Responsive adaptations (CSS media queries, possibly bites of JS)
• Content writing (Bringing the default markdown files, with minimal content)
• Testing (including common mobile browsers)
• Corrections and fixes (iterations according to community feedbacks)

Crowd funding campaign

• March 2019: https://grass.osgeo.org/news/83/15/New-crowd-funding-campaign/
  • You can contribute easily via our PayPal Money Pool: https://www.paypal.com/pools/c/86YKZiIEPV

Design and implementation phase

• The GRASS PSC will work out details in the next weeks.

Existing content - to be restructured

High priority

Legal:

• https://grass.osgeo.org/home/imprint
• https://grass.osgeo.org/home/copyright

The team:

• https://grass.osgeo.org/home/about-us
• https://grass.osgeo.org/home/contact-us

Software (see also "To be merged"):

• https://grass.osgeo.org/download
• https://grass.osgeo.org/download/software
• https://grass.osgeo.org/download/addons

Sample Data:

• https://grass.osgeo.org/download/sample-data

Docs:

• https://grass.osgeo.org/documentation
• https://grass.osgeo.org/documentation/manuals
• https://grass.osgeo.org/documentation/tutorials

Use cases:

• https://grass.osgeo.org/documentation/applications

Community:

• https://grass.osgeo.org/support
• https://grass.osgeo.org/support/community
• https://grass.osgeo.org/support/mailing-lists
• https://grass.osgeo.org/get-involved
• https://grass.osgeo.org/development/translations
• https://grass.osgeo.org/development

To be merged

These 3 pages should become a single page sponsorship

• https://grass.osgeo.org/support/commercial-support
• https://grass.osgeo.org/support/our-sponsors
• https://grass.osgeo.org/donations

These should be all combined into download/software (see also above)

• https://grass.osgeo.org/download/software/linux
• https://grass.osgeo.org/download/software/ms-windows
• https://grass.osgeo.org/download/software/mac-osx
• https://grass.osgeo.org/download/software/freebsd
• https://grass.osgeo.org/download/software/sources
• https://grass.osgeo.org/download/software/docker-images

All these screenshots could be converted into a "Gallery", for example

• https://grass.osgeo.org/screenshots
• https://grass.osgeo.org/screenshots/user-interface
• https://grass.osgeo.org/screenshots/raster
• https://grass.osgeo.org/screenshots/3D
• https://grass.osgeo.org/screenshots/platforms
• https://grass.osgeo.org/screenshots/vector
• https://grass.osgeo.org/screenshots/lidar
• https://grass.osgeo.org/screenshots/remote-sensing
• https://grass.osgeo.org/screenshots/cartography

Low priority

• https://grass.osgeo.org/download/logos
• https://grass.osgeo.org/documentation/books
• https://grass.osgeo.org/development/svn
• https://grass.osgeo.org/development/svn/svn-tags <<-- git will do that
• https://grass.osgeo.org/development/svn/svn-mailing-list

To be moved to trac dev wiki

• https://grass.osgeo.org/development/bug-tracking
• https://grass.osgeo.org/development/programmer-manual
• https://grass.osgeo.org/development/code-submission

To be moved to user wiki

• https://grass.osgeo.org/home/press-releases
• https://grass.osgeo.org/documentation/general-overview
• https://grass.osgeo.org/documentation/first-time-users
• https://grass.osgeo.org/home/credits
• https://grass.osgeo.org/home/history
• https://grass.osgeo.org/home/history/releases
• https://grass.osgeo.org/home/history/documents
• https://grass.osgeo.org/home/history/van-warren-notes

To be trashed

• https://grass.osgeo.org/download/software/live-cdrom
• https://grass.osgeo.org/documentation/search-engine
• https://grass.osgeo.org/development/compiling-grass-gis
• https://grass.osgeo.org/grass7