Am Di, 12. Jan, 2021 um 2:18 P. M. schrieb Olav Reinert
Hi forum admins (and fellow heroes),
On behalf of the openSUSE Heroes team, I'd like to inform you that I'm working on upgrading the software stack running the openSUSE Forum server.
I have set up a test server to demo the result of the upgrade:
Please take a look at it, and give me feedback on your thoughts.
As you will quickly notice, the visual appearance of the demo server is not right. That's because our custom theming on the current forum server is incompatible with newer versions of vBulletin, so it can't be reused, unfortunately. In my opinion, upgrading the production server is blocked until a new theme has been created - do you agree? (At the very least, the logo must be replaced, and more green would be nice, too.)
Since I'm not very familiar with frontend technology, I'd appreciate getting some help with this. Would anyone (any community member) like to help recreate the openSUSE styling for the new forum? Also, does anyone know who created the original custom styling for the forums?
Other than the loss of styling, migration of all forum content works as expected and without error, as far as I can tell. But of course, if anyone finds any migration issues, especially with forum content, please let me know.
Looking forward to hear your feedback.
Regards, Olav Reinert
TECHNICAL DETAILS:
The current software stack running the forums is:
* vBulletin 4.2 * PHP 5.5 * SLES 12 SP5
The upgrade will migrate the forum server to the following stack:
* vBulletin 5.6 * PHP 7.4 * openSUSE Leap 15.2
The current forum server works, of course, but is based on rather old software versions.
More importantly, it isn't administered by the SaltStack configuration used to manage most other openSUSE infrastructure - and likely never will be in its current state. This makes it very cumbersome, and a bit risky, for the Heroes team to maintain, and is one of the main motivations for upgrading.
I actually already had a version of our forums running using Discourse, and I think if we are gonna migrate the forums we might as well go with something open source right away ;) The snag we had, and I can't tell still how important it is, is the thing that also happens with your version of the forums: https://osforums.plexor.ch/forum/deutsch-german/hilfe-und-helfen/installatio... forums before certain date are completely broken due to changes in encoding in php decade ago. Honestly if you have the time to spend on vb5, I would rather like to see the time spent on migrating to Discourse, and I can probably help in some capacity so we get it all salted as well right away. Most important notes in that migration is that you have to use a converter script on the database because if you don't you end up with the only working posts being the ones from before 2011 or so. I used: https://gist.github.com/gschlager/bad57293004c0bfcddba and had success with everything working correctly. Additional point, since discourse maps users onto emails, we have to request SUSE IT to give us a list of usernames matching emails (because vb4 has wrong emails for usernames, I don't think it's important to explain why that is). We agreed with the Forums team on deploying at least https://github.com/sman591/discourse-nntp-bridge. Discourse will have to be set up using OIDC provided by our ipsilon instance at id.opensuse.org, and I hope we can also use the js script that embeds discourse into pages as a comments system for news.opensuse.org, so we have comments functionality there (in the future we may also want to use it for software-o-o, but that's still up in the air). LCP [Stasiek] https://lcp.world