Create new zoneminder.com website

[kylejohnson]

This should be part of the 1.29 release. We need a website that is tracked in source control along with the rest of our code.

• Website is currently accessible at http://zoneminder.gnulnx.net/
• Code for the website is in the gh-pages branch
• Website uses jekyll for templating, etc.

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[SteveGilvarry]

Are we closing #446? Anyway I am happy to assist here if I can, I am currently working on the wiki. I have pulled the content from the zone minder.com wiki, which is constantly being spammed. I have created pages in a clone of the github wiki.git, went through last night ditching the spammer created pages or just empty ones. I am working on dumping the attached files from the wiki also so I can include them. After that I will start trying to sort the content a little. This part will go hand in hand with the readthedocs work I did.

I assume you are still thinking about using jekyll under gh-pages that you already worked on?

I made a quick list off the top of my head. Is it possible to create each element an issue so we can assign them to people, but some are we just need to make a decision.

• ZoneMinder.com Resolve ownership issues
• Design style for website, Simple, clean. And either reflect elements of Zoneminder interface itself (i.e. Flat or Bootstrap style), or make a new design that can be used in Zoneminder as primary skin.
  • ZoneMinder Logo
  • Read the Docs Style to match
  • Forum Style
• Forum
  • Software stay with PhpBB, other options Discourse? Step change for users used to forum.
  • Clean Up forum, slash and burn, or even just set it to archive and start new?
  • Fix Google indexing of forum
• Wiki Migration
  • Copy wiki content to github wiki - Can help me if you have ftp access.
  • Delete old how to guides
  • Decide which Zoneminder Version we will keep back to
  • Distro versions we keep i.e. Ubuntu half the guides are pre 12.04
  • Camera details - should this be in Flash's Database, should we provide this as part of Zoneminder.com?
  • General spring clean
• Advertising is it needed to support hosting costs?

[kylejohnson]

@SteveGilvarry Thanks for bringing this up. I had forgotten about #446 when I created this one. :)

I'm going to close that one out, as there is more content here.

[SteveGilvarry]

I added a new controversial No 1 issue

[kylejohnson]

No. 1 is certainly an important issue, and I have an email out to Phil to help resolve it.

For v1.29, I would like to limit our scope. I propose that we setup 301 redirects from zoneminder.com/forum and zoneminder.com/wiki to forum.zoneminder.com and wiki.zoneminder.com, respectively. From there we can change the DNS records of zoneminder.com and www.zoneminder.com to point to our new solution, while leaving the existing forum and wiki software as it.

We can migrate the wiki in parallel, but I don't think that it needs to be done to satisfy 1.29.

Thoughts?

[SteveGilvarry]

I would like to try and get the wiki done asap as documentation is all over the place and lots of information that is no longer relevant. I think getting professional documentation is key and streamlining the install process. I have already ripped the wiki, maybe a couple of missing pages, into my github wiki repo, just looking to convert from mediawiki to rst and relink images that I also ripped. The only thing I don't like about github wiki is lack of image support in the editor. I have to test if I can include an image folder in repo and link to that, but has to be done using git and not github editor.

Forum needs some attention, hide some/all old releases, put sticky in all the old forums that the current version is 1.28 and how to get it for common distros. Some dead forums, or announcements that make no sense any more. Maybe no move yet, but a spring clean is in order.

If you need a hand I run a little phpbb forum elsewhere and used a crawler to rip it away from a free hosting service that hamstrung us. If we run into DB access issues anyway.

And google indexing, any idea what is up with that?

[scottgrobinson]

Sorry if it should be elsewhere... But would it be worth adding a release mailing list aswell? Or some mailing list functionallity?

I know we have the github emails and I'm happy with that personally, I understand what's going on.. But how about mailing lists for the end user who's not too tech savvy so they can keep up to date?

Maybe this should be a seperate 'issue'...

[knight-of-ni]

@scottgrobinson Good idea. I think we might be able to do something like that after we resolve the current situation with the zoneminder.com domain. We currently don't have total over it.

[knight-of-ni]

Closing this as we have previously deployed our new website.

@scottgrobinson We have a mailing list now. Let us know if you are not already on it.

@kylejohnson should we delete the gh-pages branch??