#2591 Move blogs.fp.o to wordpress.com
Closed: Fixed None Opened 13 years ago by ricky.

We are currently a little underpowered to keep up to date with all the latest security fixes in wordpress. When faced with the same issue on our transifex installation, we opted to migrate to tx.net. Thus, I think it's reasonable to migrate blogs.fedoraproject.org to wordpress.com.

Pros:
* wordpress.com runs open source software.
* maintained by people more familiar with wordpress and involved in the wordpress community.
* timely security fixes done for us, far lower maintenance on our part.
* they allow custom domains potentially for blogs like the board blog.
* one app closer to not relying on NFS off the netapp PHX2
* apps that rely on this netapp are confined to PHX2, and would not survive a PHX2 outage. apps that do not rely on it do not have this problem.
* wordpress has built in support to make migrations possible.

Cons:
* No FAS auth
* Slightly limited theming options
* We can still control CSS and achieve an acceptable theme
* The CSS theme will have to be separately maintained from our standard theming
* Our users will have to do some work to migrate. However, they will be migrating to a far better maintained and supported service, so I see this as a net gain for users.

To do this, we would want to create a test account on wordpress.com and start working on a CSS-only theme. Once we determine that it is feasible to switch (even before we finish the theme 100%), we would then email users of Fedora Blogs with a warning about the impending switch and migration instructions.


Is there an openid provider we could work with wordpress to use? Then a user could use their FAS password and be done with it.

Not sure - from a cursory view of their website, they're provider but not a consumer.

two questions:
1. does wordpress.com offer a hosted for-pay service that offers more theming options? I thought they did.

  1. does their for-pay service allow for external plugins (like fas?)

here we go:
http://en.wordpress.com/products/

custom css is $15/yr
unlimited users is $30/yr

I think we can all agree there is nothing wrong with paying for the service of free software, right? :)

Assuming we do this, the e-mail to contributors should probably outline whatever benefits there are to them of staying with Fedora-hosted-on-wordpress.com over them just using wordpress.com's free hosting.

Haha, looks like I didn't read carefully enough - I saw custom CSS mentioned on their free features page, but it seems that that's a pay feature (as is custom domains).

Also, a clarification - the user limit seems to only be on private blogs.

Ok looking at the total pricing:

$30.00/year for unlimited users

$30.00/year for ad-free

$15.00/year for css control

$20.00/year for storage

$20.00/year for domain control.

total: $115.00/year per blog.

plus it does not look like they will allow for seperate logins. [That may be with the VIP program which is $2500/month.]

Note that unlimited users is only relevant for private blogs (which I don't think we have any of). For storage, the first 3 GB is free. Thus, in the more common case, it'd probably be closer to 30 (ad-free) + 15 (CSS) + 20 (domain) = $65 / year for a blog.

While discussing this on IRC, Seth also mentioned the possibility of using post categories under one blog so that we'd only need one "official" blog with multiple categories with all of these features.

I don't see blogs continuing to have FAS logins if we move over (but the time-pressed person in me says: "Yay, we don't need to maintain our auth plugin anymore!"). Hopefully not a blocker though - maybe it'd be good to start collecting some feedback from blog owners about this idea?

I finally put together a dump of current blogs/users/post used on blogs.fp.o.

You can find the output here (as of 03/13/2011 at 14:48 UTC):
http://sijis.fedorapeople.org/reports/blogs-list-all.txt

Odd tidbits:

Total Blogs: 99
Total Posts: 561
The top 11 blogs are 68% of the total post on the site.

Remove meeting, this is ongoing.

This is completed. farewell blogs.

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