The move of the Xen Project from Citrix to a Linux Foundation Collaborative Project will have a number of implications for Xen Websites, which will be fully implemented in the coming weeks.
- For trademark reasons all xen.org sites will be migrated to the xenproject.org domain in the coming weeks. This will require care and be executed over a period of several weeks. At the moment, xenproject.org and xen.org are aliased.
Each site such as the wiki, blog, mailing lists, code repos, etc. will get a new header that includes a global navigation bar. In some cases we will create a skin or theme that matches the overall look and feel of the new Xen Project site. However, we felt it was to risky to make too many changes at once.- We have a new Xen Project community website at xenproject.org, with most of the content of the old site migrated and exciting new functionality. Normally we would have developed this site in collaboration with the community, but it was already clear a few months ago that we would launch the new website in sync with moving to the Linux Foundation and content on the new site would have been a give-away of what was going to come. As you had no chance to give feedback, we are treating the new site as a beta.
- However, the plan is to archive the old Xen Project website very quickly.
Noteworthy Featuers of the New Xen Project Website
I wanted to highlight a number of new features in the new website that are worth highlighting.
- User Profiles: The new site is much more interactive than the old site and allows users to register and interact with each other much more than was possible in the old site.
Q&A system: You will find a stackoverflow like Question and Answer system under Help > Questions and Answers. It is pretty self explanatory, but I attached a screenshot with some notes. We have question categories for New Users, each Xen team/sub-project (e.g. PVOPS, Hypervisor, ARM Hypervisor, XAPI, Mirage OS, …) and for website questions under Website Issues and Questions.
Ecosystem Pages: We added a self-service eco-system page for community members, companies and projects. The intention is that anybody who registers on the website can add an entry to the ecosystem directory. Additions of and modification of each new entry will be moderated. The new pages are the equivalent of the Ecosystem pages on the old website. The main difference is that the community will be able to maintain their own entries rather than depending on us. We will not migrate existing content, as this would mean that we – the Xen Project Community team – would own entries. However, we really want community members, companies and projects to own and maintain their own directory entries.- Job Postings: The new site will have the capability to add job postings in the Xen community. Again these will be moderated.
- Towards a true community site: The CMS underlying the new site will enable us to eventually open up parts of the site to community members and allow them to maintain their own portion of the site. For example the pages that relate to the Xen Hypervisor project should be editable by the project lead, the committers and people they invite to help maintain those pages.
I would like to encourage you all to create a user profile on xenproject.org and provide feedback or ask other questions you may have regarding the new site via the Q&A system (please use the Website Issues and Questions category).
Social Media: Twitter, Facebook and Google+ Pages
We have rebranded some of the social media accounts for Xen.org already. In most cases we registered URLs for channels, groups and twitter IDs to allow us to move to from xen or xen_org to xenproject at some point in the future. For twitter in particular, we are asking people to start using the #xenproject instead of the #xen hashtag. The #xen hashtag has been a personal bug-bear of mine for some time as #xen is used for anything from watches, suntan lotion, nightclubs, … you name it. Using #xenproject should allow us as a community to uniquely identify posts related to the project.
We also have two new community pages: a Facebook page and a Google+ page. First of all I would want to invite you to like or follow the pages. Also, these are intended to be community pages with content, pictures, posts, etc. provided by members of our community. I will initially open these to developers, see how it goes and expand later.