Goodbye mediawiki, hello new website!
Above: the old BOSC page. Below: the new one.
If you’ve been around the OBF and BOSC community, you’re probably familiar with our slightly rusty old site, which ran on MediaWiki, the same open source software that runs Wikipedia. While they’re both awesome tools, we decided it was time for a refresh.
Over the last few months, our Outreachy Intern Deepashree Deshmukh designed and implemented the new OBF website (with supervision by OBF Board member Yo Yehudi). The goal was an attractive and easily-updatable site that can function as a community-oriented hub. Did we accomplish that? Your feedback on the new site is welcome!
What’s going to happen to the old OBF and BOSC websites?
The two old sites – the old wiki / main site at http://www.open-bio.org/wiki and the blog at http://news.obf.org – will stick around for a while, but they won’t be updated any more. One of our goals was to make sure not to break any of our old links – some of them have been around for years. You’ll probably notice a banner at the top of the old pages, pointing towards the new site. Longer term, we’re hoping to redirect all our old URLs directly to their equivalents on the new website.
What to do if you spot any bugs or strange things
We’ve spent a lot of time testing, updating content, tweaking things, and squashing bugs – but no site is ever perfect so it’s possible (probable?!) we’ve missed things. If you spot broken links, layout problems, browser compatibility issues, or anything else, please let us know. If you have a GitHub account, you can log an issue directly, or if it’s easier drop by our gitter homepage chat and let us know there. You’re also welcome to pick the issue up if you know how to fix it!
Acknowledgements
As well as the fantastic hands-on work from Deepashree, we’d like to thank Yo Yehudi for her excellent mentorship of our first OBF intern, Nomi Harris for updating the content and reporting bugs, Hilmar Lapp for setting up a staging server and migrating content to the live site, and the rest of the OBF board and BOSC committee for proofreading and bug reports. A lot of people put time and effort info this and we couldn’t have done it without you!