• I think infrastructure tasks are well aligned with what we should spend money on, enabling people to build an app is a slam dunk
• Not sure we can specify a specific person, but it has been suggested before. I feel like we need to get some clarification on that. Seems like if no one on the PLC is benefiting that wouldn't be insane.
• A little worried that we're moving from lily pad to lily pad in that we're gonna end up needing a massive lift for the next major upgrade. Wondering if there is some sort of PaaS type solution here? Where someone would maintain the installation, etc. I know that for NextJS there are a few providers, but I'm less familiar with the Python solutions.
• Would love to combine this with a redesign of the website, we've talked about that on-and-off of for years, but I'm not sure that makes sense as this effort is mostly plumbing.
• I really like the idea of getting us more on Fastly for more than downloads. Frankly, the Internet kinda sucks to have a public website on today.

Dear Board,

I would like to request a budget on behalf of the

website/infrastructure team to pay for someone to perform and complete

our website upgrade.

# Background

Now that the ~1.4.1~ 1.4.2 release is done, we can finally deal with a

backlogged infrastructure issue. Which is that the website is not

currently able to be updated¹. This has happened because the version of

the website has been upgraded thanks to work by @pgcd² to move us to a

much more modern version of django, django-cms, python etc. As well as

fixing up the test suite from multiple mutations.

But this work can't be deployed to our webserver. The webserver is also

old, and part of the discussion with OSUOSL was upgrading this machine

to something newer. They'd like for us to have a machine they control

and simply have us deploy our code and data to the new machine. But

this comes with a lot of extra hand holding to make sure the web server

machine, and a lot of the configuration we've set up on live to cope

with bad actors DDOSing our site. As well as doing all the necessary

bits to make sure the site is actually deployable in a hands off way.

We can't deploy any new fixes to the website until this is unblocked.

(For example the recent request to make news articles set in the

future, not appear to be published, when they are't (yet)).

# Request

I'd like to hire pgcd to finish up the work. Partly this step requires

someone who can be trusted, to have access to machines, or data, and

I'd prefer if that person was legally bound to do the right time. And

this is the sort of thing that I'd ideally like us to pay for anyway.

I haven't put together the scale of budget this might require. But I

think $4k-$6k would be a useful amount to pay for hours necessary at

the standard SFC rate. Including having the contractor talk with and

coordinate with OSUOSL and cut out some possible bottlenecks when

hopping through volunteers.

I'd like the new site to go through Fastly CDN for all pages. Not just

media pages. So coordination with a new configuration on Fastly will

also be needed. Plus testing of a testing site.

I'd also like to include the creation and testing of data backups.

Something that scared the daylights out of me with our current

situation.

# Final Thoughts

I haven't sent this as a vote as I think it needs a bit of mulling over

before we bring it to a vote. So let me know if you can, I'd like to

get this sorted out soon though as the target for a test website

deployment shouldn't wait until we're in the middle of a new release.

Thanks!

Best Regards, Martin Owens

¹ Except for some small tweaks which are kept out of tree, Which I

don't like doing. But were needed for the DDOS protections.

² See https://gitlab.com/inkscape/inkscape-web/-/commits/master

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