Modernized, streamlined, and fediverse-friendly: OpenSource.org is fully migrated and ready to connect!

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Two years ago, we started migrating our website from Drupal to WordPress. We knew it wasn’t going to be a quick weekend project, but more of a journey. Today, we celebrate the final leg of this voyage – merging our blog back into the main site, creating a unified online experience for our community.

Let’s rewind to 2022. Our Drupal site, while trusty, was starting to show its age. It lacked the modern features and it was self hosted, which was taking a huge toll on our team. We knew a change was necessary, but a complete overhaul would have taken too long. So, we decided to move in steps: blog first, main site later.

We first migrated our blog content to a brand new, WordPress-powered platform in early 2023. This gave us a taste of the agility and flexibility WordPress offered. We loved the intuitive interface, the vast plugin ecosystem, and the worry-free managed WordPress provided by DreamHost.

Emboldened by this success, we set our sights on the bigger challenge: migrating the entire website. This wasn’t just about moving content; it was about restructuring, modernizing, and enhancing. We meticulously migrated web pages, ensuring the least amount of URL broke during the transition.

But migration didn’t just mean moving pixels and text. We took this opportunity to modernize our licenses pages. We added missing metadata and made them easily accessible to our users with a dedicated search engine. We also created a Custom Post Type for directors and forms to improve how we handle the nominations for the board elections. 

Closing the loop with the blog

Now, here we are, at the final stage of our migration journey: merging the blog back into the main site. This completes the circle, creating a unified online experience where our blog seamlessly integrates with the rest of our content – licenses, events, elections, blog and more.

But the most exciting part? We’ve embraced the power of the fediverse! Comments on our blog posts can now be posted and shared across different platforms, fostering a lively and open discussion space. This integration with ActivityPub opens up our content to a wider audience and encourages a more vibrant online community.

Looking back, our Drupal-to-WordPress migration was an odyssey filled with technical hurdles, strategic decisions, and moments of pure satisfaction. We learned, we created a single-sign-on mechanism for OSI members that works on other sites (OpenSource.net and the forum, to start) and ultimately, we emerged with a website that is modern, functional, and better serves our mission. 

Next steps for opensource.org

Next project for us will be a content cleanup and expansion. We will soon start combing through years of content, removing outdated information and streamlining what remained. This decluttering will make space for new content for the website to be more useful, letting visitors learn what Open Source is and how it can help them. We’ll also add more features for OSI members based on the new forum.

We invite you to explore the new blog, engage with our content, and join the conversation on the fediverse! And if you’re considering a website migration yourself, take heart from our story. With careful planning, the right tools, and the wonderful help of Automattic and the Pressable team, even the most complex migration can be a successful and rewarding journey.

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