New ODK web site staged & ready for changes

Development
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Latest updates

After lots of valuable feedback, including lots of effort on sorting out the new home for ODK2 docs, we have finalized the prototype and it's now living in the official ODK GitHub repository at https://github.com/opendatakit/website/. This repository is set to render HTML pages using Jekyll and auto-deploy to AWS servers -- this happens automatically every time code changes are committed to the repository.

Thanks to everyone involved with feedback and getting the repo moved over!

Checking out the site

http://staging.opendatakit.org/ is where you can see the deployed site in action for now until go-live. It is the most recent and up-to-date copy so please review that before making any suggestions or edits.

Changing or editing the site

There are two ways you can suggest changes for the web site:

  1. File an issue! As with most ODK software projects, you can also report bugs, problems, and suggest ideas on GitHub. (You'll need a gratis GitHub account.) If you're not a developer and/or not familiar with using GitHub, just sign in and click the green New Issue button at https://github.com/opendatakit/website/issues. Add a short title and describe your concerns or ideas. Someone will respond with clarification questions if necessary, or update the issue with any results. (You'll get email notifications.)

  2. Submit a pull request! If you see something worth changing, and think you know how to change it, it's even better if you can submit a pull request for your change. If you're a developer and are already familiar with using Git, feel free to fork the repo at https://github.com/opendatakit/website, commit your edits, and create a pull request when you're ready to share. For a simpler solution, just navigate to the file you'd like to edit -- for example https://github.com/opendatakit/website/blob/master/_pages/about/contact.md -- and click the :pencil2: button. GitHub will prompt you through the steps to create a copy of the website in your local account, edit the text in the file, then send your changes back to the ODK Website team.

Volunteers needed for managing edits!

Many of you in @website-wg have expressed interest previously in helping to make edits on the live site, or managing issues & pull requests that come in. Now is your chance to jump in! Please reply to this topic if you're up for helping out with the GitHub repo.

NEXT STEPS: Going live with the website

The next big phase will be working through issues tagged high priority in the issue tracker. Right now there are only a couple, so please help us identify any "blocker" issues ASAP.

As soon as these final high priority issues are resolved, the PMC will do a final review & set a date for the transfer of the http://opendatakit.org/ URL to start serving up the new site design. Issues not tagged high priority will continue to be worked on, but they should not block the site launch.

Questions?

Let us know here in this topic if you have questions about the process, want to volunteer to help out with site maintenance and fixes (now or in the future!) or have any trouble filing issues or working on editing the site. Thank you all for your support in helping deliver this important asset to the community!

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Thanks, @downey, for all your work on this!

If anyone is interested in real-time discussion about website things, the #website channel in the developer Slack is open for that. If you're contributing to the website, you're a developer, so please join if you haven't already!

I can also recommend http://prose.io/ as a nice tool for editing web pages and committing changes to GitHub without needing the command line. Thanks to @wonderchook who initially made me aware of it. :blush:

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Ooh, Prose looks exciting! (Was really hoping for a screen shot though!) Will check it out and play the next chance I get.

I can also make a recommendation for using the Atom text editor for a simple way of managing a checked-out repo for basic text-driven web sites like this one. Its built-in Git sidebar can handle committing code, pushing it up to GitHub, etc. (Note: It can't really easily handle pull requests out-of-the-box that I'm aware, though.)

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Thanks to the @website-wg for previously providing your thoughts, ideas, feedback about the future of the ODK website. The invaluable feedback helped create a blueprint for website replacement. The website has been moving forward and thanks to many people we now have a Jekyll based website in staging at http://staging.opendatakit.org/ and a GitHub repo at https://github.com/opendatakit/website

With the establishment of the new platform, much of the website conversation has moved away from the forum to GitHub. Since much of the communication is now happening on the GitHub Issue and Pull Request queue, we would like to encourage everyone who volunteered to be in the website working group to subscribe to the website repo. To start receiving repo notifications go to: https://github.com/opendatakit/website/, click on the watch button and change the setting to “Watching”.

Capture

Now that we have the basic groundwork for the site, we need your help filing and resolving issues so we can get the website ready for a soft launch. It would be helpful if everyone could take a look at the staging website at http://staging.opendatakit.org and start filing issues documenting the problems you see. We would very much appreciate if everyone took the time to file at least 1 issue (creating multiple issues is appreciated). Our focus for the next week is to file and tag any high-priority issues that prevent the site from soft launching.

If you see an issue that you can help resolve, please send in a pull request! More information about contributing with a pull request: https://github.com/opendatakit/website/blob/master/CONTRIBUTING.md

And if you run any problems sending in your pull request, the #website channel on Slack (go to http://slack.opendatakit.org to get an invite) is a good place to get quick, real-time help.

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