Towards a New CCANZ Website

Perhaps some middle ground. Take some ideas from your proposed layout and adapt them as a WordPress theme. Using a widely deployed CMS keeps the barrier to participation (and hosting) conveniently low.

Thanks @jimtittsler

@williammckee and I have been discussing off-list, and he has suggested using Django and Mezzannine as a CMS. It's not wordpress, though looks to have the usability of WP.

http://mezzanine.jupo.org/

Would the hosting costs increase for this sort of solution?

Just to summarise the feedback off-list:

• Mezzanine is a cool solution, as is Django.
• It requires more technical expertise to make changes down the line - i.e. a developer will always be required
• CCANZ doesn't have guaranteed funding, so we need to ensure we don't lock ourselves into having to pay too much on an ongoing basis to developers.

Still unknown (by me, anyway!)
* how much this ongoing development will realistically cost - this is still quite opaque for me
* whether hosting costs increase (we currently have gratis hosting, but it's worth considering
* whether there will be any barriers in the suggested CMS for non-tech people to blog, edit text on pages, etc.

Additional context:
* CCANZ has always paid a wee bit to make changes to the WP site, as the staff are a couple of English majors. It's probably averaged out to $500 per year since 2012, with the initial WP site costing $2.5k to set up (from memory).
* the CCANZ site is largely a reference site. While we blog and write case studies, the lion's share of traffic goes to the licence info pages and the 'project' pages (i.e. CC for schools, GLAM, etc). This content doesn't change very often.
* traffic varies, though is about 200-500 page views per day. It's gone up steadily over the last four years, though is unlikely to become Trademe anytime soon.

Keen to hear more views on this.

Hi Matt,

Its good to see an open community discussion on the next steps for a much needed revamp of the CCANZ sites.

The actual costs of hosting these sites in the cloud are trivial by comparison to the time of techies who make the magic happen. As you point out, the real issue is to figure out what ongoing maintenance and development input expertise might be needed in the future depending on the preferred technical solution.

Another related question is to establish how many FLOSS developers we have in the CCANZ community who would be able to commit (guarantee?) some level of support and tech time to keep things moving forward if needed in the future. In part this is dependant on the technology choices for the next iteration of the CCANZ site.

W

WordPress is regularly hacked, offers slow performance and requires continual technical attention.

I now have the ccanz website running as a static site. I had issues with the export of the site and had to import it into an existing WordPress site and re-export.

It's not perfect but here are some links:

nikola site code and source: https://github.com/wcmckee/ccanz-static
site demo: http://wcmckee.com/ccanz/

Agree that WP, though easy to host, is difficult to host well/securely over the longer term.

A static site is certainly faster and more secure... but it's beyond most people to maintain it (there'd be an awkward dependence between CCANZ staff and technically capable volunteers to make any changes).

For what it's worth, William, I'm a big fan of Mezzanine and Django (look at http://intheknow.org.nz and http://nzier.org.nz as examples of Mezzanine sites with which I've been involved :))... problem with those two technologies, great as they are, is that they are pretty obscure in the grand scheme of things... Unless people like you are committed to being available for the life of the site to tweak the codebases, keep them fed-and-watered (security updates, etc.) including managing the hosting, they become a liability to CCANZ rather than an asset...

Ultimately the website needs to be very malleable by those with the primary responsibility to promote and communicate on behalf of CCANZ... I suspect the rationale for selecting WP previously has been that there are a LOT of people who have the ability to do a passable job of maintaining and customising it, meaning that CCANZ is able to draw from a much broader pool of volunteers with sufficient technical capability.

Hi all - I've been in touch with some international affiliates, to see what would be most useful for them. Some points from those emails:

• Wordpress is generally favoured by CC affiliates, and is used by most, including HQ. Most CC affiliates are not well funded, so there's a need for something that's easy for people to implement all over the world.

• CC Europe are currently building a European affiliate website in WP. I'm checking on their progress with that.

• There are a few other affiliate web projects on the cards, so we may be able to pool our resources to get something good that we (CCANZ) can adapt locally. Not sure if CCHQ has funds to contribute.

I'm chatting with the tech person from CC Netherlands in the new year to get his advice.

I've also contacted Prefer, who provide free hosting for our sites. They have very strong policies around security, and have solved some problems for us on this front in the past. I think it's worth checking their preferences and requirements early on.

Shame to hear about CC Europe heading in the direction of WordPress. Software for designers and bad developers.

I'll still continue working on a non-wordpress cc site but it seems like cc will be locked into wordpress forever.

Cool - it's good to see the CCANZ content reused elsewhere, even if the CCANZ site stays with Wordpress.

I'm going to leave this till the first week of 2016, at which point I'll chat with CC Netherlands and Jem, our designer. We should be able to make a call at that point.

Keen to hear from others in the meantime.

Hi all - thanks for contributing to this discussion. On balance, it seems that we should stick with Wordpress, for reasons outlined above. We don't have much of a budget or any in-house technical expertise to speak of, so we need to play it safe, even if there are more technically sophisticated / elegant options out there.

In other news:

I've spoken with Jem, our designer, who is going to provide a quote. Jem is also going to investigate themes, to ensure that any design decisions are made with a knowledge of how simple / complex they will be to implement. She's relatively technical - certainly more so than me - so she'll be able to provide a good foundation on which to contract any more technical WP implementation.

I've also spoken with Maarten Zeinstra, a technical lead from CC Netherlands, who recommended continuing with Wordpress. He noted some potential fishhooks - like not integrating the design and development, and forgetting to use a 'child theme' - though I think our approach with Jem will get around that.

That's fine about sticking with WordPress. I would still like to help where I can.

I emailed Creative Commons Int weeks ago asking for the wordpress xml export of the site but got nothing back. How do I get hold of them for this?

Here are some more ideas.

Websites should not exceed in size the major works of Russian literature. http://idlewords.com/talks/website_obesity.htm

Replace png/jpeg files with svg/html5 canvas. Where possible.

Hi @richardmclaren - sorry for late reply. Did you know it's on Github? CC Int are moving more of their work there: https://github.com/creativecommons

I'll put you in touch with Jem now, to see where you can help out. Thanks!

Sorry, that was for @williammckee!

Some inspiration: One open org that has done a nice job of refreshing its site is SPARC: http://sparcopen.org/

So it seems Creative Commons is moving towards a static website. In 2015 they developed a Jekyll site.

New CC website

https://github.com/creativecommons/www2015

The site is a Jekyll site.

Yep - that's right. CCHQ moved to Jekyll since hiring some technical staff last year, and after, more broadly, the new CEO came from Mozilla.

The technical capacity of the affiliate network is different - hence, the continuation with WP. That's my understanding of the situation, anyway.

In the first few months after we first set up the cc-nz email list, and again when I held meet-ups for CC folk in a few different cities, we had a number of technologists offer pro-bono support for a CC ANZ website based on free code from mature open source projects. If only there was a platform - some kind of cross between crowdfunding and timebanking - where people could list their skills and experience, and offer a certain number of unpaid hours per week/ month/ year to a not-for-profit project! If we knew how many people, with what skills between them, were able to commit to how much time, we could run both the CC ANZ site itself and the NZ Commons site as a community-driven open source projects, perhaps sharing a common codebase with CCHQ.