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Created by Hiro@hiro🏄Reporter

Migrating the blog to a static web site with Lektor

We have been having issues with the blog for a long time. The template we are using was developed for another purpose and never really finished. We also spend a lot of money on Drupal that could rather be spent somewhere else.

I propose to migrate the blog to a static website with lektor and have comments running from discourse.org. I have actually been in contact with discourse and they have offered to run a forum for us for free (legacy/trac#33105 (moved)). Addittionally they would run an .onion and a torproject.org subdomain.

Moderation on discourse is much easier than on drupal comments (another pain point for the blog), and we would get a forum that we could use for other purposes too.

This is how the blog can be migrated.

  • We will do mockups and approve them with all the parties involved.
  • We will start migrating content and have it on staging for testing.
  • Once we are happy we will archive the current blog into static pages and move the static bloc to blog.torproject.org.

What we will lose:

  • Version history on posts.
  • Old comments. I see no value in migrating old blog comments to discourse to be honest. It would be a lot of effort and the old comments will be archived anyways in the blog archive.

What we will gain:

  • Once the blog has been migrated creating posts will be no different than editing anyone of our websites. It would actually be a bit easier since there are a few different template and pages in our website and the blog will just have posts.
  • Anyone that is currently updating the websites will be able to help people with blog posts, therefore we will gain a lot more of blog admins.
  • The blog will run from our static www rotation, so we will not have to run expensive services or 2 cache VMs in front of it to avoid paing a lot to a third party for page views.
  • We will not have to update a service every now and again. The blog will run out of static HTML.
  • We will be able to update the templates according to our styleguide.
  • Functionalities that we will build won't break because of a drupal update.