One Qt Site Unification Completed

Almost a year ago, we started a process to bring the open source web site on qt-project.org and the commercial web pages on qt.digia.com together and thus create one place where all information about Qt could be found. The plans were initially discussed last June with the Qt developer community at the Qt Contributor Summit in Berlin.

The main reasons for starting this project are outlined in my blog post from last August. In short, the split representation of Qt on two unrelated web pages and presenting the same thing as two separate products was hurting both the Free Software Community as well as The Qt Company (or Digia at that time).

A couple of months later, in September we then launched the first phase of the project, the new web site on qt.io. As you know, since then things have gradually evolved, we moved more and more functionality away from both qt.digia.com as well as qt-project.org and into the new and unified web site. Just before Easter we managed to migrate the last of our user facing services over to qt.io.

qt-project.org still contains a few selected services. These are mainly things that are related to contributing to Qt, such as our gerrit. We will discuss further at the next Qt Contributor Summit whether to move them under the qt.io domain as well or not.

While the migration and unification of the existing content to the qt.io web site has now happened, this doesn't mean that we are done with the work. We are aiming to provide a single sign-on solution through the Qt Account to all our services (forums, wiki, bug reporting, customer portal, etc). This work is still ongoing. Once completed, we believe it'll greatly improve the experience of using qt.io and all related services. In addition, we are looking into providing additional value with the Qt Account by offering some integration into Qt Creator. We are currently discussing different ideas such as saving and restoring settings, forum and bugtracker integration as well as other items. As we move along with the planning, we will reach out to our users to validate the usefulness of these features and integration. I encourage you to give us feedback on this topic.

The unification project has not only been about our web presence. We have also started working on bringing the open source and commercial versions closer together from a packaging perspective. So far the open source, evaluation and commercial packages have been completely separated, even though there are large overlaps in the content. Bringing those together and having one way to install Qt helps us reduce our workload and thus provide higher quality packages to everybody. We will roll out a new online installer in the coming weeks that will be used to install both commercial (purchased) and open source packages. The new online installer will start asking for a Qt Account login when installing, in order to recognize and present the right license to you and automatically install any commercial/enterprise add-ons that might come with your license.

Apart from the work around the Qt Account and packaging, our work related to the web site will from now on focus on incremental improvements. We would like to invite you all to give us your feedback on how you think we can improve things on qt.io.

I'd like to thank everybody who has been involved in the unification project. A lot of people at The Qt Company have helped with different parts and made sure the whole migration from the old systems went as smoothly as possible. I'd also like to thank all our users for their patience if something wasn't quite as it should have been and for giving us feedback on where we need to improve.