481731 - Switch www.mozilla.org from a build system to PHP includes

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(www.mozilla.org :: General, defect)

Description

[Samuel Sidler (old account; do not CC)]

We should move www.mozilla.org to PHP includes instead of the current build and template system. That means adding a header/footer as well as "navigation" and "sidebar" includes to replace the current templates (or something along those lines).

This is pretty high on my todo list, but that list is pretty long. ;) I'll probably start fairly soon after the staging server (and SVN) is setup.

Comment 1

[David Boswell]

I'd just request putting everything in an includes/ or templates/ directory so we can tidy up the top-level a bit.

Comment 2

[Samuel Sidler (old account; do not CC)]

Yeah, all PHP includes will go in some subdirectory.

Comment 3

[Robert Kaiser]

I don't really like that strategy, I'd like it much better if we stayed with a build system similar to what we have right now but based on the template toolkit stuff, very much the same way as we're doing it for seamonkey-project.org, as I very much like to be able to have a fully valid and reasonable HTML document when editing things locally.
But then, I love PHP but hate those in-page includes as much as I love VCS systems and hate SVN. We're moving all into a direction where I'll just keep my hands off most webby stuff at Mozilla, it seems. First MDC, now mozilla.org :p

Comment 4

[Samuel Sidler (old account; do not CC)]

My argument (which I've made at meetings) is that websites shouldn't be "built". Ever. You can setup a local environment for PHP very easily, fwiw. This is what we do for caminobrowser.org.

Comment 5

[David Boswell]

It sounds like there are two different issues here.

-- If we can switch to a templating system that still allows people to stage pages locally, will that meet everyone's requirements?

-- If moving to Subversion is going to prevent people from contributing, then we need to talk more about this.  AFAIK, we could start working on a new template system independently of the repository work (maybe I'm wrong).

Comment 6

[Robert Kaiser]

I don't buy the argument that preprocessing ("building" in our current terms) is worse than postprocessing (e.g. executing PHP inside pages every time they are accessed), it's merely a different way of doing things - but maybe we are in times where mostly static web content is obsolete and evil, just lik back when we abolished other static media like paper and books.

The SVN thing alone wouldn't completely draw me away (like MDCs new editor did), but might make me do less. Still, I find it a half-hearted VCS solution. But we shouldn't discuss two things in one bug and it's my fault that I missed a meeting.

Comment 7

[David Boswell]

Re comment #6, I think the big difference is that the current system makes us rebuild the entire site if we make one small change on one page.  To me it is much less usable than a templating system that doesn't build.

Comment 8

[David Boswell]

Some information about the implementation of the new templates is at:

https://wiki.mozilla.org/Mozilla.org/Design_Implementation

Reed, could you post more information to this bug or to that wiki page about how people can help out and what sub-tasks there are?  A couple people are interested in pitching in, but I'm not sure of all of the relevant information.

Comment 9

[David Boswell]

This is done on the staging site and is ready to go.  Closing as fixed.