The transition of the Mozilla Developer Center to MindTouch Deki is hopefully going to be complete by the end of June. The delays at this point are largely due to my newbie status at managing a project involving this many people; there are steps I simply didn’t think of.
Here’s what’s happening right now:
Quality Assurance
Mozilla’s QA folks are poking at our test site right now, making sure everything’s safe. They’ve found three or so issues that need fixing; they’re all fixed now but not yet deployed to our test site for verification.
Version Control
We still need to get the setup into version control. While we have the trunk Deki repository set up, we have some customizations that need to be dealt with. Additionally, the skin needs to be checked in so that localizers can work on it. I’ve mentioned this before. What’s new is that I believe IT and webdev have now come up with a plan for how to set things up.
Going forward, there are a few other things that will help to dictate when we actually launch:
Firefox 3 Launch
Firefox 3 is due to roll out on Tuesday, June 17th. This is now occupying essentially all of IT’s and webdev’s time, so work on the MDC launch is largely on hold until Wednesday, June 18th. Hopefully then we’ll be able to get enough of their time to get the rest of the work done fairly quickly.
Localization
I hope that we’ll be able to get at least our most active localizations of MDC done to the skin in time for the launch. The delay in getting the skin into version control may prevent this; we’ll see. I don’t think it will take very long for each localization to be done — it’s mostly button names and things like that, which shouldn’t be a big challenge for the folks that normally localize extensive amounts of documentation!
Database Conversion
We’ll need to do one, last, conversion of our MediaWiki database into Deki format. In order to do that, we’ll have to lock down the current MDC database to disallow editing during the final stage of the transition, so that changes don’t get lost in the shuffle. Once we know the date that we will actually do the roll-out, we’ll be able to announce when the current MDC will be locked.
After that, we’ll need to do some testing and be vigilant to be sure everything’s working up to snuff. And, of course, expect lots of blog posts from me on how to work in the new world order!
