Update on the qt.io website work

Hello, some news from the new qt.io website work we are doing.

First, thank you to everyone who provided feedback on the new qt.io site, we appreciate all the comments we have gotten on different channels. And while every comment will not make it as a change to the site, we do evaluate every single one of them and see if something needs to be tweaked.

Please don't expect instant changes, we have a pretty long backlog including big items like: "How do we solve the problem of using a unified Qt account for logging into all the services we provide on the web?" A bit of patience on your part is appreciated.

That said, the documentation pages are next on the list of things moving to qt.io. One target of moving the documentation is to bring all the open source and commercial documentation under one landing page. That means that you will find all relevant documentation from one location, no more jumping between two sites.

During the documentation move, we will be retiring the docnotes feature on qt-project.org. While there have been some very high quality notes from the community, the feature has mostly gone unused. The effort to maintain the docnotes feature is not worth the benefit that it brings.

One thing we have on the list of things that could be simplified, is contributing to documentation. The issue with contributing to the documentation is that the documentation is built from the Qt source itself, thus any changes to the documentation need to go through the same process as code contributions. And the contribution process might seem a bit complicated to people who are not familiar with it. We haven't figured out how to best do this, so it's still in the backlog. If you have ideas on how we could make contributing to the docs easier we would appreciate if you shared them with us.

The schedule for the documentation page moves to their new home on qt.io is before the Qt 5.4.0 release.

We will also be moving all downloads to qt.io with the same schedule as the documentation. The upcoming Qt 5.4 beta will be available on both the qt.io and qt-project.org sites, but now that the qt.io download page has been updated based on the feedback we got (thank you!) we hope that you already move over there for the downloads.

The wiki will be moving over to qt.io after the documentation and downloads as well. The new wiki will be a MediaWiki instance. With the wiki, the biggest amount of work is not setting up the new wiki, but rather moving the content over to the new wiki. We have a lot of external links coming into the wiki, and we need to have pointers to the new wiki from the current one. A rough estimate is that we need to move between three and five hundred pages to get decent coverage in the new wiki. To do this we will be asking for your help in copying content over and marking pages as moved. But more on that in another post later when we have the new wiki up and running.

As for the forums, those are on the list after the wiki. No fixed schedule for that yet, as we need to figure out how to move the almost 50 000 discussion threads we have on the forums.

We'll be making more posts on how the site move is going as work progresses here.