Discuss mailing list

[Jonah Aragon <jonaharagon AT gmail.com>]

I'm sorry, it wasn't meant to be condescending towards the admins themselves. I can't tell you how many times it would've been nice to change things on the homepage or add a working voting system to be told that they would have no idea where to begin. The problem isn't with the webmasters, but with the fact that the WordPress site was built so long ago by a single person that nobody really seems to know the correct way to go about changing it anymore. Coupled with the fact that they're the only people who CAN edit the site and giving others that power would be a security risk (with all that WordPress entails), AND the fact that everybody is extremely busy, it's just been hard to get anything moving.

If we moved to a smaller simpler site, I was just pointing out that it'd be a lot easier to get things accomplished, and allow more people to contribute to updates.

Jonah

On Feb 18, 2017 11:36 PM, "gp" <discuss AT lists.opennicproject.org> wrote:

Hello,

Having to install ruby to build a site makes me lay down rivers of tears, however I do have to regularly spend very little effort to find security issues in OpenNIC code, so I do agree with moving any of our custom code to static or better written stuff. I didn't inspect the site (sorry), but overall I support the move. Workflow would be better and more transparent, and easier than pestering people over email or irc.

Regarding your random jab at the site admins, no they're not clueless, and yes they are busy. no need for any of that condescending stuff (and im not even one of them)

+1 from me.

-gp

On 2017-02-19 00:56, Jonah Aragon wrote:

Hi!

I've been working on a new design and system for the homepage, and I
wanted to gather some opinions on what works, what doesn't, and what
you think about replacing our current WordPress site (at
https://www.opennicproject.org/). You can check out my design at
https://jonaharagon.github.io/opennic.org/.

Some background:

The WordPress site currently host a simple homepage, a basic
membership system (essentially providing a profile frontend for the
LDAP system), and a blog that's rarely been used. WordPress creates a
lot of load on the servers and is just in general bloated. MySQL
databases, dynamically generated pages, none of this is needed for our
homepage, especially if we try to move everything to the wiki. In
addition, the website (mainly the aforementioned login system) is
susceptible to XSS attacks, among other vulnerabilities. Coupled with
the massive amount of security holes that just appear to show up in
WordPress all the time
(https://www.cvedetails.com/vulnerability-list/vendor_id-2337/product_id-4096/),
I'm honestly surprised we haven't migrated to anything else already.

My site (code at https://github.com/JonahAragon/opennic.org) is
complete static HTML (which is compiled with Jekyll) homepage. It
includes all the important features of our current site, even the
closest servers information, with a cleaner, simpler design and setup.
It places more emphasis on our top level domains, and it still
includes a blogging system for future Press Releases and updates
(which I think we should utilize more):
https://jonaharagon.github.io/opennic.org/press/.

Because it's a static site, the security risks are nonexistent and it
can be hosted anywhere. If this were to gather relatively good
opinions from all of you, I'd push it to our organization at
https://github.com/OpenNIC so anybody would be able to edit it (via
Pull Requests). Ideally we could setup a system to automatically pull
(from GitHub) and build the site on our webservers behind some
lightweight server like Nginx. That way we'd be able to keep the
existing servers and TLS functionality (which GH Pages does not
support with custom domains) everything is just more open, compared
with random WordPress administrators who as far as I can gather fall
between the "not having enough time to update the site" and the "have
no idea how to operate WordPress" categories.

Anyways, this was a really long email about a really simple topic.
Sorry about that.

Hopefully all of you are on board,

Jonah

P.S. Also this would be the perfect time to switch to our opennic.org

[1] domain for the homepage and add some 301 redirects when we move,

that'll just look nicer in general (and there'd be no need to move all
the sites to that domain, at least not right away).

Links:
------
[1] http://opennic.org


--------
You are a member of the OpenNIC Discuss list.
You may unsubscribe by emailing discuss-unsubscribe AT lists.opennicproject.org

--------
You are a member of the OpenNIC Discuss list.
You may unsubscribe by emailing discuss-unsubscribe AT lists.opennicproject.org