I thought I’d write a few words about the new OPF web site and our immediate plans for it. The new look reflects our new brand and the release alongside our new strategic plan feels like a real milestone. In order to ensure last Mondays launch went smoothly we opted for a reliable initial release with the aim of adding incremental updates to the site and supporting infrastructure over the coming weeks.

Blogging

The most important feature of the site, this update will be released on the evening of Tuesday 25th November so expect it for first thing on Wednesday morning. This release will include:

• blog authoring via a visual editor or a text based HTML / Markdown editor;
• proper formatting for code blocks in blogs;
• improvements to the sites author and user profile pages;
• display number of reads / comments for blog posts; and
• improvements to the mobile site menu.

OPF Wiki

We’re also working to update the OPF’s Confluence Wiki, which will be complete for release on Monday 8th December. This includes moving the Wiki to our updated servers, improving reliability. This will mean that the Wiki will be unavailable briefly on the evening of Saturday 27th November, and for the weekend of the 6th and 7th of December.

Digital Preservation Q&A Site and COPTR

The digital preservation Q&A site will be moved to our updated servers over the second half of December. There’ll be one or two improvements such as markdown support for questions and answers. This will that the site will be unavailable for short periods over Christmas, there’ll be more information closer to the time.

COPTR will also be migrated to our new servers over January 2015. Any down time in the service will be minimal and kept to outside working hours. Again there’ll be more detailed information giving notice of exact dates and times.

Continuity

Finally, one of the aims of this work is to move our hosted services onto newly built servers using a more efficient web server stack making them more reliable and easier to support. At the same time our re-brand has meant that we’re also now using a new URL [https://staging.openpreservation.org]. It’s important to us that things such as old openplanetsfoundation URLs aren’t broken in the process and we have taken care to make appropriate DNS changes to ensure that this isn’t the case. If you do find a broken link or there’s another issue following the move do let us know.

In conclusion I’d like to say that developing the new site has been hard work but fun, we hope you like it as much as we do.