Migration of research group websites from Plone CMS - Project 388

This will be the web page for the project to migrate (research) web sites off the Plone based wcms.inf.ed.ac.uk service.

Project 388 - https://computing.projects.inf.ed.ac.uk/#388

From starting talk minutes of 17/1/2018

We will probably need to set up a VM to host as we don't want all of these 
on edweb (web.inf) necessarily. Institutes can then do their own migration. 
Group specific modules can be distinct even when hosting multiple instances 
on one server. Alternatively modules could wait on them getting added to 
the central edweb for benefit of whole community. We need to audit 
remaining active content. Switch to Neil as lead developer.

23/3/2021 Updated status

Non-domain sites

The list of all zope stubs: anc classic-project dice emime hcrc hcrc-reunion icsa idar09 iiab ilcc ipab jast lfcs migration mngu0 notaservice pbf2013 pepa sandbox sspnet transfics ultrax. ect to web.inf

Next steps:

• Contact site owners and see if any sites can just be deleted - done
• For those that are static, but there is still a need/desire to keep online, grab a static copy just by spidering the public content - use httrack and insider info
• For the others, discuss a suitable alternative technology: Central wiki, WP, EdWeb?
• Put these steps in project.

Dev update 5/2/2020

A recap:

Project to kill off the old Plone/Zope based sites hosted on wcms.inf.ed.ac.uk.

Three options:

• delete
• make a static HTML version
• migrate to some other technology

There are/were a total of 22 sites hosted on wcms.inf.

• 7 definite delete - 7 deleted
• 7 definite make static - 7 static versions now done eg www.emime.org wcms.inf.ed.ac.uk/jast
• 4 definite migrate - ANC and LFCS web.inf.ed.ac.uk, (ANC completed, LFCS needs redirects) other 2 (ultrax-speech - done, mngu0 - DNS issues)
• 4 others - cisa,icsa,ipab all redirecting to web.inf, but deep links still possible. sspnet dithering between delete/static, will make it static while they make their mind up.

Used httrack, plus a little insider Plone knowledge, to create the static versions. It does a pretty good job. eg:

Static- http://www.classic-project.org/ Plone - http://wcms.inf.ed.ac.uk/classic

We can also do some Plone fiddling before the static site is captured, to make it more obvious this is an old site. eg

http://pbf2013.inf.ed.ac.uk/

The static versions of the sites are being served out of AFS at /afs/inf.ed.ac.uk/group/web/static-plone/

Work still to do:

• Migrations:
  • mngu0.org should have had their new site in Jan 2020, but domain issues at present.
• The 4 CISA, ILCC, ICSA, IPAB which all now have web.inf versions, so in theory they are done. But it is possible some deeplinks are not being redirected, as they have no "catch all" on those sites. These need to be checked.
• write up, don't see that a DPIA will apply.

18/5/2020

A little progress. Still to do:

• LFCS redirect to web.inf. Waiting for OK from Deputy DoI
• CISA catch-all redirect once deep links checked
• ICSA catch-all redirect once deep links checked
• IPAB catch-all redirect once deep links checked
• SSPNET waiting for Jon K to agree to deletion
• mngu0 owners migrating to WordPress site

23/3/2020 dev meeting update

As usual, not much progress, but there's not too much left to do (for me). Things that have happened since last report:

• icsa - Catch all put in place. Old site archived and deleted.
• ipab - List of deep links sent to infcomms, awaiting response. Putting in a catch all for this looks fairly uncontentious to me.
• lfcs - Again, nudged infcomms.
• I have archived and removed sspnet.
• I chased mngu0 again, and they have accepted my offered to creating a static HTML version while they prepare a new site. This shouldn't be too hard once I figure out how to get httrack to use the authentication cookie so it can walk not just the public content.

-- NeilBrown - 29 Jan 2018