Pending items before going live

Created on Sunday 23 August 2020, 08:55

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  • ID
    37011
  • Project
    Metabolism of Cities
  • Status
    Completed
  • Priority
    Medium
  • Type
    Programming work
  • Tags
    2020 Launch Sprint
  • Assigned to
    Paul Hoekman
  • Subscribers
    Carolin Bellstedt
    Paul Hoekman

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Description

Today we want to activate our new site. Hereby a task to keep track of the key things that should be done before going live. What comes to mind is the following:

Stuff related to search engines

We should get this right from the start because once we go live, search engines will update/visit our site and try to index things.

  1. Embed 301 redirects for old URLs (some URL patterns have changed and we must catch this before search engines register tons of 404s)
  2. Set up Canonical URLs for those pages where it makes sense. This is especially relevant for news, events, library items and anything in the community hub. Those elements are often repeated in subsites and we need to indicate a single canonical URL.
  3. Set up a robots file to exclude particular folders
  4. Fix this incredibly weird URL pattern that comes from the way I hacked away at the urls.py file in Django to be able to re-use certain URL patterns but at the cost of ending up with these kind of URLs in certain edge cases.

Content

  1. Whatever lorem ipsum is still floating around should either be replaced by correct content, or be removed when going live
  2. Remove non-functional links or fix them (CONTACT link in footer to start with, let's add other ones as we find them here). Also in the libary; WATCH DIGITAL TOUR
  3. Fix nav menus on those sites that still have temporary navs, like the data portal
  4. Disable for now the podcast site - there is no content yet
  5. Set up newsletter subscription option
  6. Fix as many pages where the <title> tag isn't properly defined

Other

  1. Update the github repo (not SUPER urgent as no one is actively pulling / pushing stuff but let's try to get this sorted soon)
  2. Once we go live, replace all "new.moc.org" links with moc.org

That's it for now, I'll add more here as it comes to mind. Please also feel free to add things that are programming items that should be fixed before going live.

Discussion and updates

Paul Hoekman Paul Hoekman Johannesburg
3 years, 8 months ago

New task was created

Paul Hoekman Paul Hoekman Johannesburg
3 years, 8 months ago

Task was assigned to Paul Hoekman

Paul Hoekman Paul Hoekman Johannesburg
3 years, 8 months ago

Status change: Open → In Progress

Paul Hoekman Paul Hoekman Johannesburg
3 years, 7 months ago

Spotted another thing: there are various places where HTML tags are being shown within the content. Like this:

<p>hello this is text</p>

It's because I've started implementing this Markdown and we now default to that. However, imported posts from the old site should where applicable be configured to show tags.

Paul Hoekman Paul Hoekman Johannesburg
3 years, 7 months ago

Canonical URLs were set up for library items, news, and events.

Paul Hoekman Paul Hoekman Johannesburg
3 years, 7 months ago

Okay the robots.txt is set up and excludes the user uploaded files, the contact page is provisionally set up and footer links fixed. Various <title> tags have been fixed over the past days. The first 301 redirect are set up for library items. Need to map out which others are fundamental for now.

Paul Hoekman Paul Hoekman Johannesburg
3 years, 7 months ago

I've set up various redirections - principally the ones to the old old site, plus redirections of the data hub so that MultipliCity links are temporarily forwarded to the initial data hub city progress pages, and later to their appropriate pages. I'll do a general review of the state of everything on the site, and unless there are drastic issues I'll put things online and then we can slowly go through the remaining things!

Paul Hoekman Paul Hoekman Johannesburg
3 years, 7 months ago

I've set up our github account. We used github before, then went to gitlab, but I find that there is too little action there, and it has more complexity than we need. So back to github it is. I have set up two archived repos, for our previous websites, and a new repo for our current archive. I've changed our footer link to point to this repository.

Jeje it's quite fun to see how development on our previous version pretty much came down to zero as work started on the new site, earlier this year, check out the graph. There's also a STAFDBS repo as it turns out it makes more sense to have a separate structure for that.

I think we're pretty much all set to go live. I'll confirm in a meeting that we'll have just now, and then put things live this afternoon.

Paul Hoekman Paul Hoekman Johannesburg
3 years, 7 months ago

Yohoo!! We are LIVE with the new website!!!

Congrats everyone for all the hard work!! I still have a few open things from this task so I'm going to leave this open, but I'm gonna leave you with the screenshot of metabolismofcities.org, as per Tue Aug 25 2020 15:03:05 UTC...

Carolin Bellstedt Carolin Bellstedt Metro Vancouver Regional District
3 years, 7 months ago

FANTASTIC Paul!! Congrats and many thanks to the entire team 😃

This is the start of a new chapter: Metabolism of Cities 3.0. Incredibly exciting!

Paul Hoekman Paul Hoekman Johannesburg
2 years, 10 months ago

I believe that all items were done at this point, closing this...

Paul Hoekman Paul Hoekman Johannesburg
2 years, 10 months ago

Status change: In Progress → Completed