WIP starting to draft document for the CHAOSS website infra project

projects/website.md

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+# CHAOSS Website Infrastructure Project
+
+## Background:
+Prior to the creation of the Infrastructure Team within CHAOSS, the way in which the CHAOSS website was hosted was not very clearly documented and was under the control of a set of people that wasnt well documented and seemingly changed occasionally.
+
+This was part of the reason for the creation of the Infrastructure team - to create a group of people who could collectively own the CHAOSS core infrastructure in a way that was documented and governed out in the open.
+
+## Objectives of this project:
+1. Bring the CHAOSS Website (https://chaoss.community) under the control of the infrastructure team
+2. Document the operation of the CHAOSS website and the procedures surrounding it
+3. Steward the infrastructure of the website in an ongoing basis, ensuring community members are able to contribute to its content while allowing necessary administrative and maintainance tasks to be performed.
+
+
+## Governance
+
+TBD
+
+
+## Phase 1: Adoption
+Status: Complete
+
+This phase mostly (but not completely) addresses the goals of objective 1. It has successfully brought the CHAOSS website under the control of one member of the infrastructure committee (Adrian). This moved the CHAOSS website from its previous hosting provider into a self-hosted docker container whose infrastructure is being donated to CHAOSS. This was done under relatively compressed circumstances to preserve website uptime and buy time for future migrations. The remaining piece of objective 1 (to ensure anyone on the infra team has the ability to control the infrastructure) will happen in a later stage as the infrastructure comes under a greater degree of community control.
+
+
+## Phase 2: Stability
+
+Status: In Progress
+
+This phase helps stabilize the website infrastructure (moving out of a docker container to a more managed environment) and introduce some nice to have management features that the docker container would require us to largely do manually, such as:
+- easy backup and restore
+- separate development and production sites with easy copying between them.
+- security updates and better monitoring
+- support available from the managed provider should that be needed
+
+These improvements should allow CHAOSS community leaders with administrative logins to wordpress to feel more confident in their ability to make changes without breaking things, allowing us to embark on projects such as:
+- cleaning up old plugins
+- keeping the site updated and secure
+- trying bolder, new ideas
+
+
+## Phase 3: Long term
+
+While Phase 2 above puts us in a great spot for the website, this is still not ideal due to:
+- Wordpress itself requires an additional login step for contributors to use it (as well as account creation)
+- The wordpress contribution workflow is different from a typical "fork and pull request" contributors may be used to
+- The Infrastructure from phases 1 and 2 that support the site rely on donated infrastructure controlled by one member of the Infra team
+
+Ultimately the end goal is to transition the website over to a static website, hosted on github pages. This has been discussed in a few different CHAOSS community calls in early-mid 2026 and has many benefits:
+- Lower confusion with how to use wordpress plugins
+- Fewer login steps (can use existing github account)
+- Website contribution workflow can be the same as contributing to any other working group via the github pull request flow
+- Much of the content from the current wordpress site is already being fetched from git repos as static content anyway (such as the code of conduct and CHAOSScon pages)
+- Wordpress is a very common target for automated bot-driven website takeovers, not using it would help keep the site secure
+- Static websites have more hosting options available for much cheaper - often for free (i.e. Github Pages)
+
+
+This phase is by far the largest/longest as any website solution that aims to replace the CHAOSS wordpress site should be as 1:1 of a replacement as possible. This means meeting at least the following criteria (this list is not exhaustive and subject to change per the governance section above):
+- Ensuring the new site looks and feels substantially the same as the current site (i.e. using similar-looking CSS styling and color schemes)
+- Ensuring all images, documents, and other assets available for viewing or download on the site are present on the new site
+- 1:1 URL parity - all links to website pages should work as they did with wordpress, or at least redirect users to the same page as the wordpress link would have
+- support for custom redirects is needed too - the CHAOSS site currently uses redirects as a form of URl shortener for linking to the current years meeting notes document (and other pages)
+- Ability to support building the site from content that is spread across many git repos. We want to avoid having an impact on existing working groups who maintain subsets of website content in their own repos (like the data science WG's practitioner guides). Any new site that aims to replace wordpress needs to support using this content as-is