Ardour Web Forum Migration

12 years ago the Ardour Forum was launched and there have been little to none infrastructure updates since.
12 years of Ardour online community.
12 years of web-evolution!

Brace yourself, because we have opted to perform a long overdue modernization and migrate the forum to discourse.org!

The most significant changes compared the previous forum are: support for dynamic notifications, a flat front-page with context and the page-less layout. Just keep scrolling down.

That barely scratches the surface though. There is plenty to discover and we hope you’ll feel right at home here with us!

However, we will leave you with some nostalgia from time to time:

  • User-accounts remain at https://community.ardour.org. This includes
    • Sign-on and password management
    • Download purchases, donation and subscriptions

All forum posts and comments have been migrated. You can even find the very first post of the then “The New Ardour Website” from early 2006 here :slight_smile:

There are certainly some loose-ends to be tied up to complete the migration. If you find some dangling links, or please don’t hesitate to let us know in the comments. You’re also more than welcome to leave feedback about this site, its organization and how we could improve it in the Feedback Section.

Let the discourse begin!

6 Likes

Discourse! Conflict! Chaos!

Curious to see what will come of this. I do think moving to hosted infrastructure and a static site is the way to go, and Discourse is definitely one of the more popular options, so it will be interesting to see how long it takes to get used to it.

Seablade

PS The community.ardour.org site itself probably needs some TLC for layout purposes.

No hosted infrastructure here my friend. We’re running Discourse on ardour.org. And the old Drupal (dynamic) site remains a critical part of the infrastructure for downloads and finance, quite apart from continuing to provide login authentication to this one.

Very nice, especially for cell phones!

Yeah, like the new forums from what I’ve seen so far. Thanks!

Hi, very nice new migration and look graphic of Ardour Forum. Good work at all staff

gennaro

This is a huge step forward. Really great news.

Congratulations! this is awesome!

Good! Editable posts, links- are links! Great thanks!

Will the look and feel of the main Ardour site be similarly updated / modernised? At the moment it feels a little confusing because various parts of the main site don’t quite style the same (as the forum) and the navigation bar is often slightly different on different pages.

There are 6 components to the overall web site:

ardour.org <= static web site, flat file structure
community.ardour.org <= drupal 6, dynamic CMS but now used only for a few things
tracker.ardour.org <= very old version of mantis bug tracking system
discourse.ardour.org <= forums, using Discourse via Docker
nightly.ardour.org <= static (automatically updated) web site
manual.ardour.org <= static web site, flat file structure

all of which rely on a totally different web backend. We have a pile of money sitting around waiting for anyone willing and able to do the remaining work to integrate the sites to the maximum extent possible. This includes:

  • single sign on extended to include tracker.ardour.org
  • style (CSS) consistency wherever possible
  • introduce new payment systems

I tried to recruit people to do this work a couple of years ago, without much success. Recently, Robin Gareus stepped sideways for a few days and got Discourse (with single sign on linked to community.ardour.org) up and running. It will take someone else to step up to do the remaining work, but they will get paid (not a huge amount by typical web contracting standards, but actual money).

1 Like

The main ardour front-page is great as-is, isn’t it? Is there anything in particular that you think we should change there?

That is indeed an issue I’d also like to see resolved. It is one of those seemingly simple things that is more complicate - in particular unifying drupal and this forum. I dare say we’ll get there, come time.

Sure it looks ok - its in the nature of these things that they are very subjective, but mainly there are some bits where to me the design ‘language’ feels a bit mixed up (e.g. the ‘Download’ button on the front page is not flat - whereas the rest of the site is now predominantly flat. Similarly the front page title bar has a shadow / highlight which seems at odds with the mainly flat style)

1 Like

Hi! I love the new forums, and while I’ve been away from these forums for quite a while doing a bunch of stuff including using Ardour daily, I would be happy to help with the migration as design and integration are my strong suits. Lots of experience with CSS and webstores, and of course I’ve been using Ardour since version 1.something-or-other, so I would love to put my skills to use helping with a project that I not only use and recommend, but that’s been central to my ability to ditch proprietary closed source software.

@Paul, feel free to write back here or send me an email if you’re interested in having me on the team :slight_smile: .

@macinnisrr , your offer is very welcome.

To elaborate on @paul’s earlier comment:

The Layout/design/style (ie CSS) is fragmented between the four main sites now (ardour.org, community.ardour.org, discourse.ardour.org, nightly.ardour.org). This is mainly top-navigation, but also button-styles (shadow, colors).
While it’s likely not trivial and some work to unify the look/feel. It’s at least clear what needs to be done.

The other issues does need planning and a strategy. Perhaps easiest to discuss this on #Ardour IRC.

The bug-tracker should first be updated to a recent version of mantis. Then we can come up with a strategy to merge existing accounts for SSO (probably match by email-address, then handle missing accounts somehow). Alternatively we may migrate to an entirely different issue-tracker. Any ideas? So far for our purposes mantis seems mantis sucks least.

I’m not sure about payment systems. So far community.ardour.org (drupal) serves two purposes: user-account database (single-sign-on) and payment (incl. subscriptions, download-management and donations) and does that very well. I suppose we can just keep that.

It all sounds fairly straightforward honestly, just a matter of doing. I’m working in the office most days, will hop on IRC right away while I am - thanks :-).

I just spent about 20 minutes browsing around and found several responses to threads that I didn’t realize had continued after my comment! I find the new forums much more useable. Thanks for the migration!

You can also opt-in to receive emails and/or in-browser notifications for topics that you contributed to.

Visit your user preference icon top-right, or direct link: https://discourse.ardour.org/my/preferences/emails

When migrating existing user-accounts we’ve opted to disable the “Activity Summary”, since we didn’t want to batch-notify all the users (and spammers) we’ve accumulated over the last 10+ years in drupal.

was that available in the old system? My comment was about threads from several years ago that I’m finding through the “Suggested Topics” at the bottom. I received an email about your reply so it seems to be working. :slight_smile:

Font sizes on

https://community.ardour.org/

seem to have become way too small (unless its always been like that and I’m remembering incorrectly - anyway, text (“Welcome to the Ardour community…” banner and links) seems unusually small in relation to the Download, Bug Tracker, Support etc icons)