Hi Folks! Today I tried to work through some helpful contributions to our website[1], and I ran smack into some pretty severe tech debt for our web presence.
For starters, none of our documentation talks about how to build / deploy or contribute to the website. That's pretty bad. What's worse, our "How To Contribute" guide is on the obsolete ASF wiki and points folks to SVN from when we were a subproject of Apache Hadoop (!!!). Eventually, I chased down that our website stuff is run out of this old svn repo: https://svn.apache.org/repos/asf/avro/site 1. edits go into "author" 2. the website is built using ant and Apache Forrest 3. results will be in "publish" 4. both edits and their results are committed at once to svn 5 ... 6. website is updated What's worse, our website still relies on an old version of the Hadoop website infra. author/skins is an svn external reference to their website as it was in 2014. This is why our footer materials all refer to Hadoop and not to Avro. Before any of us start digging into fixing some of this stuff, what do we want from our website? Humbly I suggest we just eat the up-front investment in switching to the current asf infra best-practice. I think that's using gitpubsub to publish from a stand-alone git repo. In atleast one other project I'm on, the source material for the website lives in the main repo and a jenkins job automatically publishes updates. I'd love us to also switch to markdown, asciidoc, or anything else that isn't editing xml. [1]: AVRO-2170, AVRO-2171
