Hi All, Occasionally over the past 6 months we've discussed moving server and services from the present server, but as yet nothing concrete has happened. I'm now ready to knuckle down and make it happen. However, there is still decisions to make and work to do. This I need both your suggestions, feedback on how well certain server technologies work for you, and time in migrating content across once we've got the new website and services setup.
One the version control front my plan is to migrate from subversion to git, and myself taking ownership of the openscenegraph over on github would probably be easiest to do in terms of work from myself and community. Given we have plenty of other work to handle in server migration having one of the tasks happen smoothly is good, and is something we should be able to do rapidly. I tagged openscenegraph-3.1.2 dev release last Friday, so this could well be the last activity I need to make in Subversion! While migrating across to use github's openscenegraph is easy, there are other projects that our current server provides - VirtualPlanetBuilder is the main one, this I will probably need to manage the migration of, and my intention is to sit it alongside openscenegraph in github. There are also other smaller Tracs/subversion projects hosted like as part of osgforge.org : osglua, osgpython, osgdotnet, osgtutorial and osgProducer. There is very little activity or any discussion about these that I'm aware of - so my assumption that these are largely inactive/dormant. To keep life simple I'd like those who are responsible for these projects, or would like to assume responsibility for them to step forward and tell us what you'd like to with them. Please come forward now if you want to take on these, otherwise assume that these little ancillary projects will disappear. For mailing lists and forum we currently don't use the present server so these services need no changes. All we need to do is keep links to these on the new server/website when it goes live. Now we get to the big task before us - new server and web technologies for the new website and services. I would like to be able to provide a professional looking website with the main elements easily accessible for end users and for easy for the website maintainers to provide content for and manage. I would also like a section of the website to remain a wiki/enable community provided content. A wik/user content opens the door to spammers using the website for their own nefarious deeds so we'll need a robust user account system and system for monitoring commits from the community by review my wiki administrators so we can catch the spammers before they do too much damage. I'd like the user account system to be easier to manage than the present one - needing the server admin to grant permissions adds extra work for everyone. In terms of server I have a Dreamhost account that includes full hosting so moving the OSG website to dreamhost is fine by me - currently I use Dreamhost's Mailman support to provide the osg-users mailing list and the blog.openscenegraph.org is hosted by Dreamhost. Dreamhost allows use to install various web technologies for our hosted websites, technologies like MediaWiki, WordPress, Joomla and Tracs amoung others. I'm open to suggestion on what technology to go for, so please step forward now with feedback on various CMS techologies you've used and what think would work well for the OSG. I'm also no web/server amin person, I'm user of these systems rather than admin so I'm having to learn about them, and right now feel rather overwhelmed by all the options and terminology so feel free to provide links to good resources about learning about these. Also if you've seen other software project websites that you feel work really well and would be worth learning from please come forward with links and tell us what parts work well or work less well. Once we've got a short listed set of technologies I'll get these set up/work with other to get them set up and then we can start experimenting with website mock ups to test things. I can set up an openscenegraph.org subdomain for this purpose or just reuse the openscenegraph.com for this while we are experimenting. Once we've decided upon the tech we can then progress onto migrating the existing openscenegraph.org content across. The layout and style of the website will be partly determined by what is possible with the tech we choose, but we'll still have a pretty open hand to do what we want. The current website looks OK, but it's not great, I think we can do better, but not being a graphics artist type I'm not one to really push forward a great new look and layout. Here, again I welcome suggestions and direct help in refining things. When populating the new website we may be able to migrate quick a bit of content but also I think it's time for us to write some new content - many of even the main pages haven't been updated for years. Links to videos as well as screenshots of user projects/applications would be a good thing too. I guess a youtube channel might be approrpriate for this. Basically I'm open to suggestions and even more open to actual help. If you can help with advice or even better your time in helping making this stuff happen then please step forward ;-) Thanks in advance, Robert. _______________________________________________ osg-users mailing list osg-users@lists.openscenegraph.org http://lists.openscenegraph.org/listinfo.cgi/osg-users-openscenegraph.org
