jfn6030217 commented on pull request #165: URL: https://github.com/apache/incubator-spot/pull/165#issuecomment-656929101
Originally, the ONI website was a WordPress website. WordPress websites are made to be regenerated after every change; the actual content is stored in a database somewhere. The website itself is just an artifact of the generation process. At some point, someone took the final WordPress generated version of ONI and turned it into the static website for Apache Spot. Without WordPress and its php behind it, this static site had the ornamentations of a live WP website but lacked the ability to do anything about it. WordPress was duplicative -- blog posts could contain tags and categories and stuff, and WordPress just re-wrote deep copies of everything all over the place. This was causing endless grief as we could never truly understand which of the umpteen versions of a file was the one people were seeing on the website. Many of these copies were unreachable, or only unreachable through paths nobody would ordinarily take. There was a full remnant of an RSS system, with its copies of stuff. So I grabbed a broom, and I turned our static-version-of-a-wordpress website and removed all the things that were non-static. Things that used to have PHP behind them but no longer do. The result is a truly static website with only one copy of all the content, so when you want to change the content, you'll find only one of them, and you know which one to change. These things were pruned: /wp-content/ /wp-includes/ "Archives" sidebar (/YYYY-MM/) /feed/ and references to absent XML functionality /comments/ "Filed under" (/category/) /tags/ /includes/ blog posts that were migrated to /blogs/ but not removed from their original places At each step along the way (you can follow the commit trail), the entire repo was meticulously checked to ensure there were no references to *anything* inside of a directory before that directory was pruned. This became an iterative process, as pruning a now-unused directory lead to more unused directories. With these changes, we have a real proper cruft-free static website. We may someday want to turn this into a live website, but the first step of getting there is to de-duplicate all the various stuff WordPress had scribbled all over everywhere, so we know what is up from what is down. No content has been lost. ---------------------------------------------------------------- This is an automated message from the Apache Git Service. To respond to the message, please log on to GitHub and use the URL above to go to the specific comment. For queries about this service, please contact Infrastructure at: [email protected]
