CUNY Academic Commons

At the last few team and subcommittee meetings, we all agreed that we should deprecate and eventually remove the wiki. Let's use this ticket to organize that work.

To start, we will need to move selected content from the wiki -- like the CUNY Digital Humanities Resource Guide -- from the wiki to another space -- probably a blog.

We may want to contact creators of other content on the wiki to see whether they want our help in moving content.

We will also have to reframe our help workflow, since much of it is based on the wiki FAQs.

I am attaching an Excel spreadsheet that contains a draft list of tasks for deprecating the wiki. I can add dates after we agree on the tasks. I am going to close the the ticket that duplicates this effort.

The attachment wiki-documents.csv contains a list of Wiki pages, along with some info about them: date created, info about creator, date last edited, info about last editor, revision count. I've tried to edit out the noise (eg, file uploads and auto-generated Categories) but there may still be some in there. Scott, can you spend a few minutes with the document to see how it looks to you? If I can provide more info that would be helpful, I'm happy to do so.

Thank you for having a look, Scott.

Based on your comment - "quite a number" - I'm assuming you think we should do both of the following:

(a) move everything first, and contact people about the move afterward (instead of contacting them first to find out whether they'd like things moved - there are too many pages for this)
(b) move things in an automated fashion, since it's a large amount of content (we'd discussed the possibility of doing it manually)

Is this correct?

Thanks also for the research regarding cms2cms. I've seen this service before. To be honest, I don't know that I trust this kind of thing to a service. Not that they don't do a good job - they probably do - but I want to be sure that things are moved over in a way that's sensitive to our server environment, our redirect requirements, etc. Since I've already written the code to create a list of extant wiki pages, most of the work is actually done. It's only a small task at this point to loop through them all, make an HTTP request for each, parse out the page content, and then convert it to a WordPress page.

I'll work this week on writing this tool. Maybe I can get it up and running on cdev, so that we can begin testing. I'm assigning the ticket to myself as I work on this.

On a related note. Scott, do you have any suggestions for what the new WP-based wiki site should look like? Any themes you have in mind - either existing on the Commons, or something we could install fresh? Would it be best to go with something simple, like a theme based on Twenty Sixteen? Should we try to make it look kinda-sorta like the old wiki?

Thanks for having a look, Scott!

I neglected to move the categories first time around - whoops. I just did a re-import that parsed out and added them as appropriate.

From what I could see, there was no easy way to gauge based on the wiki page output whether a category was nested (subcategories). So currently the hierarchy is flat. My suggestion is that we manually fix the hierarchies - it can only be a few dozen categories.

Scott, can I ask you to look into the following tasks, as next steps?

1. Review the Categories, and reorganize in hierarchy as needed https://wiki.commons.gc.cuny.edu/wp-admin/edit-tags.php?taxonomy=category&post_type=page
2. Identify and delete any obvious test pages, category pages, and other stuff that shouldn't be there https://wiki.commons.gc.cuny.edu/wp-admin/edit.php?post_type=page I think you can probably see just by looking over the titles that some of the pages are sandboxes, etc, and should be sent to the trash
3. Make some concrete suggestions about how to modify the existing Twenty Twelve theme about how to make it display the content better. For example, the categories are not currently displayed anywhere (because they're technically Pages, and Twenty Twelve doesn't put categories in the page template). Where would they go? What would you like to see in the sidebar (feel free to make those changes yourself)? Anything we can do with color schemes, branding, etc to make it integrate better with the rest of the site? Maybe something like what you've done with the Codex?

Regarding "active" wiki - I would say that we do not want to have a public way for people to request access in an automated way, but it's a good idea to have something somewhere on the page - maybe an About page, or maybe in the footer - that explains how the site holds all the content migrated from MediaWiki, and gives info about how to get in touch with the team to edit/remove content.

Excited to move forward with this. As noted on yesterday's call, it's in the 2.0 milestone, but we can make the move sooner if we are ready.

Have we decided on the publicity that will surround this move? Two possible categories:

1. An email to content owners to let them know that we've moved stuff. I imagine it'd take the form: Here's what we've done; here's why; here's what's happened to your stuff (maybe personalized? though this might be too difficult); here's what you need to do (mostly nothing, unless you have content you want edited or removed, in which case we can add you to the site as an Author). Someone will need to draft this. I can pull a list of email addresses.
2. More general publicity - hero slide, news post, etc. This is what Steve suggests above. I'm not sure that this is really necessary, but it's a nice way to document the process - we could frame the post as a narrative of how use of the Commons has changed over time, and how we try to respond to it. I think this is optional, and doesn't have to correspond with the migration itself.

It's possible that we do only one of these. I don't really have a preference.

Technical steps:
a. .htaccess redirects. This should include single posts and category posts.
b. Category name translation (underscores to hyphens. WP handles this for post slugs, but not for category slugs)

I've written code that handles both a and b: https://github.com/cuny-academic-commons/cac/commit/eab48bde8d7a477e3d24c9ddbb07eab9dc8b9031

As Steve notes above, the final step at launch will be to change the Wiki tab to Events, which will point to commons.gc.cuny.edu/events/.

I think we just need some decisions about publicity, and then we can schedule the move. Assigning to Steve to handle the coordination - once we're ready, hot-potato it back to me.

Thanks, Sarah!

I think we are done here. I'll keep the wiki database and codebase in place for the time being, in case we discover anything that hasn't been migrated properly. At some point in the future, these things can be cleaned up. If anyone notices glitches in the migrated content, please open a separate ticket.