Migrate website away from wiki.gnome.org

[SqAtx]

The website is at https://wiki.gnome.org/Apps/GTG, which now has a banner that the site is planned for retirement:

The migration guide recommends migrating to https://apps.gnome.org

[nekohayo]

Yeah, it seems like we're supposed to be migrating to apps.gnome.org (which is surely not something we have access to because #798 / #234) or to a bunch of markdown files in the git repo (which are not as flexible, so urgh...) or basically roll-our-own-website, none of which I have had the time and energy to try to do over the past year.

GTG used to have its own dedicated website (for the sake of marketing), which we could try doing again but that's way more work than a wiki page of course.

What would be the preferable way forward? Are we going to just turn everything into readme files in github, or should we also have a pretty standalone website? I don't mind designing and hosting the website, I have the infrastructure to do that, but I'd like to know if @diegogangl would actually want that to happen, and then I would need to find the time to do it (and probably get a new appropriate domain for it, etc.)

[nekohayo]

From a marketing standpoint, what I want to avoid is loss of control due to old content lingering on the read-only archived version of the GNOME Wiki eventually as it would become carbon-frozen and non-updateable; I would want our migration to delete all the old contents and put redirects in place.

[diegogangl]

The best solution considering visiblity would be apps.gnome.org but I'm guessing you have to be accepted.

There's also Github pages but I think the theme selection is more limited. If we go with the website way, I would make a very simple one page that links to flathub page, and the readme files in the docs for contributor stuff

[Neui]

GitHub pages is basically just HTML files, we can have any theme. Jekyll integration is just an integration, not an requirement.

[picsel2]

Deadline incoming 😱: https://discourse.gnome.org/t/wiki-gnome-org-will-be-retired-on-23-october-2024/24543

[Neui]

I've made a (supposed to be quick) proof-of-concept: https://neui.github.io/gtg/ (from https://github.com/Neui/gtg/tree/gh-pages)

We could create a repository named getting-things-gnome.github.io to use gettings-things-gnome.github.io as a domain rather than in a subdirectory (since my repo is named gtg, it is in the gtg subdirectory on "my" domain). It is using GitHubs jekyll integration mainly because that is what they advertise and I wanted to use Markdown (I think it would be enough for us). It appears we can use a different generator with Github Actions (or GitLab CI if we swtich over). I used pandoc to convert the HTML from the wiki to Markdown and cleaned it up manually.

[nekohayo]

@Neui Frankly I think this is great, you've done a fabulous conversion job here and it's certainly going to be better than whatever I would hope to achieve by myself. I guess you could throw that as a merge request to GTG and we deploy that ASAP, and then I delete all the wiki's contents to just point to the new planned resulting URL?

[Neui]

I don't think the old wiki content should be "deleted" but rather let there be a banner (on important pages?) to the new URL. So that old links still work, you can maybe read the contents if the new site isn't available, and possible conversion mistakes on my side.

I can't do a PR here because the gh_pages branch doesn't exists. (Unless you want me to make a docs subdirectory under the master branch, which the pages settings suggests is possible).

There is also the question if we should put the wiki directly under https://getting-things-gnome.github.io (which means a new repository called getting-things-gnome/getting-things-gnome.github.io should be created which contains the site) or in a subdirectory like I have (https://getting-things-gnome.github.io/gtg/, and pushing into the gh_pages branch of this repository). I would do the extra repository one so it's separate from the main repository and has a cleaner url (no subdirectory, the domain name already implicitly contains gtg).

[nekohayo]

I don't think the old wiki content should be "deleted" but rather let there be a banner (on important pages?) to the new URL. So that old links still work, you can maybe read the contents if the new site isn't available, and possible conversion mistakes on my side.

Indeed, the pages wouldn't be completely deleted from the wiki (i.e. not create 404 there), but instead I would replace their contents entirely by a short message / URL pointing to the new website here on github.

As you mentioned elsewhere, GitHub pages assigns the subdomain based on the username/org name, and we don't get to pick a custom one. In any case, I think we will make do with this, and worst case scenario if we are ever asked/forced to change the name someday we can probably do that on our side… the link that the GNOME Wiki would link to would break, but then that would be their problem for not having updatable things anymore, at least we wouldn't have a bunch of immutable contents in there ;)

I would do the extra repository one so it's separate from the main repository and has a cleaner url (no subdirectory, the domain name already implicitly contains gtg).

I agree that it should probably be a separate repository rather than within the code repository, to keep things cleaner an lightweight (and it allows converting to some other website at any other time anyway). Let's try to do that and see if it works.

[nekohayo]

Thanks to @Neui's fantastic conversion/preservation work, all the contents have been successfully moved to https://getting-things-gnome.github.io, then I went through each page under https://wiki.gnome.org/Apps/GTG/ to modify their contents to point to the new location (with also a 5 to 7 seconds redirect). I edited 58 pages that way, hopefully I didn't forget any 🤞

Some pages redirect to the precise replacement URL (like the handful of core pages that were made post-2020, and the liblarch reference pages), some point to a topic index (like the GSoC ones), and most point just to the new home page (especially for very old contents), because I have no guarantee that links will always keep the same location and structure in the future.

There are a few issues remaining, listed in https://github.com/getting-things-gnome/getting-things-gnome.github.io/issues, but I think we should be good for now, overall.

It would also probably make sense for @diegogangl to remove https://github.com/getting-things-gnome/gtg/wiki if that folder in the main code repository was meant as a stopgap solution. With that (or at least a decision on that front), I think we could close this ticket.