communitymanager's Blog

Migration Update

At long last, an update. 

I haven't said anything in a while, because there hasn't been much to say.  Work is happening.  About 400 projects have now been moved over to the new site, and my email client is currently choking on sending the next batch of notifications to project owners.  I expect to get them all out by the end of today.

Expect the Collab forge to start looking like a ghost town over the next couple of weeks. 

Some projects are being locked for migration this week.  In a few days you'll be able to find their repositories, mailing lists, and issue trackers on the new site at <projectname.java.net>.  Docs and files, and the mailing list archives will remain on the old site for another few weeks.  When we move those, we'll also put the redirects in place. 

Over the next few weeks Tonya and I will be going through the rest of the site and locking the rest of the projects, and then tagging them "unmigrated".  There are a couple of reasons for this:

1. Locking renders the project read-only and sends another email to the owners and prompts them to contact me if they missed the communication about migration. 

2. At the end we'll have a list of unmigrated projects, as well as the last time their code and documents were updated to publish on the new site. 

3. If there's something that obviously should be migrated but wasn't requested, I can contact owners and add them to the list myself. 

As we expect to have all of the active projects on the site locked by the end of the week, we'll be shutting down user registration here as well. 

Our CMS - editorial, blogs, wiki, forums, will stay put for now.  We're working on integrating this system with Kenai and expect to officially relaunch the new site with our new design in mid-February. 

migration update: beta.java.net is live!

beta.java.net went live last night with a few projects from the GlassFish Community.  I've updated the help section to include information about the migration including a list of projects that have requested to be moved here. 

We started sending out email to all registered users yesterday with a temporary password that will allow you to login and reset your passwords on the new site.  Please note that the passwords between the old and new sites will not be synchronized.  Tomorrow I'm going to start sending email out to project owners to advise those who haven't done so how to go about requesting migration via the opt-in form.

That's all for now, it's the end of a 13 hour day for me.  I expect there will be a few more of those in the coming weeks - but all for a great cause! 

We're getting new forums! Want to help test?

Starting on Monday 10/4 we will have a test server set up with our new forums.  Why do we need new forums?  The Jive product we've been using was EOLed quite some time ago, is totally unsupported now, and is the cause of many of our recent short term site outages.  The new forums will be more tightly integrated with our content management system.  We put a banner message up on the forums pages to notify the most regular users.  If anyone would like to help test next week, even if it's just for an hour or so, please email me at communitymanager@dev.java.net and we'll get you set up.  If all goes well with the testing, the forums will be dark next weekend, and the new system will go live on Monday 10/11. 

--Sonya

Tell me what you think.

For several years now I've been involved in on-again, off-again plans to do a major upgrade to the site.  This time it's really happening.  People are working on building out the new site now, and we're going to start rolling out the migration plan here once the first tests are complete. 

Our goal for migration is to reach parity - we need to offer nothing less than what we have now on the site in order for it to be useful to everyone.  However, I'm really excited that beyond that, the new site will be developed by an agile team, so we can try new things and be in a state of constant improvement across the site.  Adding new features won't be a years-long process any more. 

Since we've got this going I think it's a good time to ask you all, what do you think of the site?  I'm looking for constructive criticism here.  Tell me what is wrong and what could be fixed, or what you love and want to stay the same forever and always.  My goal here is to cast the widest possible net.  There are plenty of things on the site that annoy the heck out of me. 

Here's a bit of my list in no particular order:

 - duplication of content and hidden content - often the things I don't care about are available everywhere, but the thing I want (FAQ, help, general information) is almost impossible to find. I'd like to completely revamp the left nav and find a way to streamline access to that information.

 - dead and abandoned projects listed in the catalog - this is a failure of our community management system.  Some communities do a great job of curating their projects, but most don't.  Worse, we have inconsistent standards across communities.   I'd like to publish real standards for what all communities should use to decide if a project is incubating or published in the catalog, and then improve the workflow system we use to move these projects through, so it's as easy as possible for leads to stay on top of things.

 - the catalog sucks - our search system needs a major update.  I want to be able to search for projects with downloads, projects with active bug lists who might be looking for help, and by development activity (among other things). 

 - there's no way to know at a glance what kind of activity is happening in a project - we need activity stats available in an automated way so users can know if a project is dead or not without having to check through several pages of project infrastructure pages. 

That's just the beginning.  I've got opinions on just about everything here, but I'd like to hear yours and be able to respond to them and put them in the long term plan. 

So, what do you think?

--Sonya