PHPTAL website hosting

[Potherca]

Introduction

In the conversation on #48, it became apparent that it might be useful for the PHPTAL website to fall under the same responsibility as the code-base.

Currently the PHPTAL site is hosted on @pornel's personal server.

It might be a good idea to set up a phptal.github.io repo and use Github Pages to host the content of the PHPTAL website.

This issue is for discussing the pro's/con's and details of what such a plan entails.

Details

The website currently consists of the following sections:

• Download
• FAQ
• Introduction / Homepage
• Mailinglist
• Manuals
• News
• RSS/Atom News Feed
• Wiki

As far as I can tell all of the pages can be served from static content except for the wiki. Github offers wiki functionality, so that might be enough to port the current wiki to.

Github Pages also has support for RSS feeds so that shouldn't cause a problem.

Having all the docs (both the manual and the site) in a repo would allow people to send in PRs and would make it possible to automate things.

If PEAR support is eventually dropped, http://phptal.org/latest.tar.gz would not longer have to be updated. For the time being, this would constitute a commit/PR for each new release. (If that becomes too cumbersome the process could be automated in a build step).

[kornelski]

For updates of the current site I could:

• have a cron job that downloads current website repo and deploys it, or
• set up an nginx proxy that fetches static pages from github.io (but wiki stays untouched)

[Potherca]

Would you rather have the wiki migrate to Github or keep it on your server? (The later would save us the time of having to move the pages in the wiki over manually).

[kornelski]

I'd rather keep the wiki as-is

[Potherca]

In that case I think a proxy is the way to go... Is it possible for you to drop the source of the pages into a repo?

[kornelski]

Added https://github.com/phptal/website

Keep in mind that it requires xmlto, probably a bunch of symlinks to docs, and paths to be just like on my machine ;) Also for syntax highlighting I've been using an experimental DOM-based branch of PHPTAL.

[Potherca]

Final question before work on this can commence... We basically have 2 ways we could go about this...

1. Keep (as much as possible of) the original implementation
2. Convert to Jekyll/GH-Pages

The main advantages of converting would be that it's easier for people to contribute to the content (not sure how important this use-case is) and that there is a clearer separation between data and presentation. A lot (all?) of the build logic could also be dropped in favour of the build done by GH-Pages. The main disadvantage is that knowledge of Ruby/Jekyll/GH-Pages is needed when working on non-trivial functionality.

The advantage of keeping the implementation is that the problem domain stays within the realm of PHP (and make) so no extra knowledge is needed. The disadvantages that I see are that there is more logic to maintain and that an extra build/deploy step is needed to produce static HTML to host.

Do you have preference/opinions either way? Also @Ocramius, thoughts? (Abbreviated/ a few word is fine).

[kornelski]

I've added HTTPS on phptal.org.