Notes from www.mozilla.org planning meeting on 7/31
davidwboswell
- Introduction
We spent a few minutes going over the recent activity on the site.
Since most of the audience contained people who had been coming to the
recent planning meetings or who were already familiar with the site's
history, we went through the introduction quickly.
- Archiving
The group decided that we are ready to move forward with the archiving
process and that we would blog soon about this process starting. The
process will involve people with CVS access to the site making
judgment calls about which content to archive if there is any
uncertainty about the status of a page or the ownership of a page
(owners will be consulted if ownership information is available).
Because there are so many pages and the ownership of much of the
content is unclear, approaching this in a more methodical way didn't
seem practical. We did clarify however that going forward, we wanted
to have ownership for all pages on the site clearly defined and that
these owners would have control of what happened to that content. We
also discussed talking to gtalbot to see if he would be interested in
helping with this process.
- Staging Server
We discussed creating a staging server that can be used to build out
the new site design. It was felt though that a staging server in
general wasn't needed and that we can continue to commit directly to
the site.
- Content Management
We talked about some of the available CMS options for the site and
stated that it is a requirement to have an easy to use editing system
for updating pages. Although Doctor can continue to be used for now,
it was agreed that we need to be looking at other options since Doctor
isn't being supported. Subversion, Hg, wikis and other CMS options
were discussed and we talked about setting Subversion up on the
staging server when that is created. As part of this discussion we
also said it would be nice to no longer have to build the site and
some options were discussed.
- Localization
Fantasai spent a few minutes explaining how she would like to handle
localizing content on the site. There were no objections to her plan
and we decided to go ahead and post one or two localized versions of
the Mozilla Manifesto as a test of the new system. There was a desire
to move off of CVS though before we localized content more broadly.
- Design Work
We are in the process of selecting an agency for the design work and
will have an update soon.
- Communication
There was a desire to resurrect website-drivers@ as a place to
coordinate for people who are currently actively involved with working
on the site. The people who are already on website-drivers@ will be
given an invitation to stay on if they like.
- Next Meeting
David will schedule another meeting sometime in late August.
L. David Baron
> - Archiving
>
> The group decided that we are ready to move forward with the archiving
> process and that we would blog soon about this process starting. The
> process will involve people with CVS access to the site making
> judgment calls about which content to archive if there is any
> uncertainty about the status of a page or the ownership of a page
> (owners will be consulted if ownership information is available).
> Because there are so many pages and the ownership of much of the
> content is unclear, approaching this in a more methodical way didn't
> seem practical. We did clarify however that going forward, we wanted
> to have ownership for all pages on the site clearly defined and that
> these owners would have control of what happened to that content. We
> also discussed talking to gtalbot to see if he would be interested in
> helping with this process.
Shouldn't redirects to the archive be added when directories are
archived? Given that the archiving process has in fact caught
actively maintained docs that are the primary docs in their area
(e.g., http://www.mozilla.org/newlayout/doc/ ) and given that adding
a redirect when a directory is archived is a trivial one-line
changet to the .htaccess file (adding to the end, of course, so that
earlier redirects that apply to the same file happen first),
shouldn't redirects be added as part of this process?
-David
--
L. David Baron http://dbaron.org/
Mozilla Corporation http://www.mozilla.com/
davidwboswell
> archived?
We will certainly set up redirects for some of the archived content,
but the plan is to not set up redirects for everything that's
archived. For instance, we felt that it wasn't necessary to redirect
meeting minutes from 2001 and other similar types of content that was
only of historical interest.
> Given that the archiving process has in fact caught
> actively maintained docs that are the primary docs in their area
> (e.g.,http://www.mozilla.org/newlayout/doc/)
This is a good example of something we should set a redirect for. We
didn't set a redirect initially since we had assumed all current docs
are being maintained on MDC and we didn't realize these were still a
primary resource.
David
L. David Baron
> > Shouldn't redirects to the archive be added when directories are
> > archived?
>
> We will certainly set up redirects for some of the archived content,
> but the plan is to not set up redirects for everything that's
> archived. For instance, we felt that it wasn't necessary to redirect
> meeting minutes from 2001 and other similar types of content that was
> only of historical interest.
Why not? People may well have links to meeting minutes (perhaps in
other documents about the project history or that are now of
historical interest) because they're interested in what was recorded
there. Why do you want to break those links?
davidwboswell
> other documents about the project history or that are now of
> historical interest) because they're interested in what was recorded
> there. Why do you want to break those links?
We felt that it was important to not automatically redirect people to
the archive site in general so that it was very clear that people were
going to a place that contained out of date content. If the current
link on the 404 page is not clear enough, we can certainly look into
making it more prominent so people won't miss it.
Again, we are interested in setting up redirects for pages where it
makes sense (not all archived pages will have current pages that we
could redirect to). If you would like to help with the archiving
process to make sure that things are being redirected appropriately,
we'd be happy to get your help.
David
fantasai
Doing things this way is probably a good idea for now, since it makes
it much more obvious when something is taken out that shouldn't be,
but I think our goal should be to set up www-archive.mozilla.org with
templates that make it very, very obvious that this is an archive
site, and then make everything transparently redirect.
~fantasai
L. David Baron
> > Why not? People may well have links to meeting minutes (perhaps in
> > other documents about the project history or that are now of
> > historical interest) because they're interested in what was recorded
> > there. Why do you want to break those links?
>
> We felt that it was important to not automatically redirect people to
> the archive site in general so that it was very clear that people were
> going to a place that contained out of date content. If the current
> link on the 404 page is not clear enough, we can certainly look into
> making it more prominent so people won't miss it.
For what it's worth, when I saw the 404 page, I figured I'd have to
edit the URL by hand, since the text in the hyperlink was "archived
version of mozilla.org", which I assumed would link to the root of
the archive site (given the text). It turns out it links to the
page on the archive site that I'm likely to want, but that goes
against the expectation set by the text.
davidwboswell
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=449446
Feel free to add any suggestions for redirects there. I'll also add
this link to the planning page so it's there for reference.
> For what it's worth, when I saw the 404 page, I figured I'd have to
> edit the URL by hand, since the text in the hyperlink was "archived
> version of mozilla.org", which I assumed would link to the root of
> the archive site (given the text).
We're happy to take patches or suggestions for the 404 page, so feel
free to open a bug about this.
Thanks,
David
fantasai
>
> but I think our goal should be to set up www-archive.mozilla.org with
> templates that make it very, very obvious that this is an archive
> site, and then make everything transparently redirect.
And the bugs filed for that are
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=436423 (templates)
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=453475 (redirects)
~fantasai
fantasai
Sorry, wrong buglink. That should be
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=453475 (automatic redirects)
~fantasai