Because both sites are currently being hosted and paid for by a community member, we would like to transfer them to Community IT. mozilla.de is a static site that just needs PHP and as far as I know, the domain ownership has been transferred already. camp-firefox.de is the website of the German Firefox community that also includes the support forum. It’s based on phpbb and migrating it would involve setting up phpbb, copying the database over, transferring domain ownership and changing the DNS entries. My question would be what the next steps would be.
This makes sense.
Let’s start with filing a bug here.
- where is this site hosted now?
- who are the site admins / contacts?
- who is the right technical contact to work with?
I wanted to follow up on this discussion, as I’ve talked a bit with Fux and others on IRC about potential ways to approach this migration.
Camp Firefox
I think that moving Camp Firefox to our WordPress Multisite installation, once it is production-ready, is a no-brainer. It’s currently on Drupal, and I personally don’t think it would make sense to support another CMS when we have scalable WordPress in place.
As for the forum on Camp Firefox, we have to think about what would have the least overhead and also what would be an easy transition for people used to the phpBB forum that’s already there. My first instinct is bbPress; if we move Camp Firefox to WordPress, we can install the bbPress plugin and have a forum be fully integrated into the site. bbPress is a known quantity that is created by the creators of WordPress, and a drop-in plugin does not involve a ton of extra maintenance or scaling work, as that’s covered by the overarching WordPress installation.
What we could also consider is creating a new Discourse instance for the German community. This would be a great way to test our ability to spin up a new, scalable Discourse forum on the fly (paging @yousef), but it would also be a big transition, visually and functionality-wise from phpBB. This would definitely involve getting a lot of input from the community about what they’re comfortable with (and requirements for a forum).
In both cases, there are utilities to import a phpBB forum into that platform, so that is ideally a nonissue in the context of this discussion.
Mozilla.de
I’m going to hold off on ideas for this (for now), as we’re still talking about how to approach static sites that are currently on our shared servers, and this is a largely static site. @jan, is PHP just used to keep the header and sidebar constant on every page?