The alternative update plan from Thilo Pfennig
- There is a need of a new wiki server. It does not make much sense to do endless discussion without the ability to test and do stuff.
- Essentially the alternative update plan bases on the facts that we now have many users which are old spam accounts or outdated. Same is true for pages - the many pages do not help people to find stuff and new pages are created all over the place.
- The plan is to have more control and instead of updating the wiki we transfer some pages and users and then have an old wiki with all the old stuff.
I will lay out the details below:
The new SFD wiki farm
MoinMoin allows to make what is called 'wiki farms'. This allows the installation of many wiki instances with the same base code installation
- It allows us to share one user base. So every user is member of ever wiki, but has different rights based on the different defaults.
- This will also allow us to be more flexible with different user groups and contents and also to have some sane defaults.
I suggest we create at least the following wikis:
Administrative wiki - members of the board and wiki administrators have access and use it for internal server planning.
SFI wiki - most pages are only readable by members of the board, unless they addan individual or group
SFD wiki - with most of the stuff we have now, readable to all, writeable for all registered users or mabe also for those, who use TextChas.
Old SFD wiki - all old data will be moved to another wiki, which will not be part of the wiki farm and does contain all old users.
Plan for Migration
- There will be no automatic process for moving old users to the new wiki. We would create a page on the admin wiki (which should be the first to create), where we put all the user names where we think the are ok and then find out a sane way to move just them to the new wiki farm.
We will create packages for all pages we like to move. Packaging pages is something MoinMoin provides for a long time. You then upload the pages to a new wiki where they are extracted and placed. This also gives us some backups for the most interesting pages.
Plan for new structure
- Currently users do create pages wherever they think it is appropriate. Mostly this is wrong. OTOH in a wiki it does not make much sense to structure pages hierarchically like we do it now.
Rather than the current /teams structure it would make much more sense to have extra pages for every country and/or continent, city and then do a cached search with a macro. The only proble we would face is that if there are two teams with the same name we would had a name conflict. But OTOH we might also consider this a feature.
- This macro search can also be limited and we can use categories more extensively, if we want.
We should add the CreatePage macro on major pages . This provides the users a template to create a new page. Alternatively...
- ... we could link the registration script with the creation of a team page and a wiki user. So that team names are always right
New features
- A nice navigation menu for important stuff
- A team profile account managed by the team leader with:
- Team leader name and email
- Location GPS coordinated
- Optional address (for schwags eventually)
- others
- A registration API:
- for local sfd communities and site to avoid forcing duplicate registration: new team register once and appear on local SFD site and SFD worldwide
- A download/upload area with nice GUI for presentations, movies, demos, artworks, sponsorship contracts and templates, PRs templates, translations of content so each team can contribute and/or search for useful content before the event
- A year long marketing campaign about SFD to build year long awareness and get teams to generate content (see above) that will make SFD even more effective
- A community generated howto section on how to prepare/organize their event (we already have some/a lot of that)