Project scope

[psrpinto]

I think it would be useful to define the scope of this project to make sure that all parties are aligned in a common vision. Since at the moment there is no publicly-available document that I'm aware of that provides such information, I figured it would make sense to document it in this Discussion.

Below I provide my personal vision for what I think this project could be, from the perspective of the user. I'm deliberately refraining from mentioning technical aspects, and focusing solely on the experience of the user.

The goal would be for us to use this as a starting point, and iterate on it based on received feedback, until the scope of the project is clear and makes sense for all involved parties.

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The Try WordPress project provides a graphical user interface that guides a user through the process of importing all the content of an existing site into a WordPress site, regardless of what technology powers the existing site.

This GUI allows the user to perform all required steps to achieve a new site that is as faithful as possible to the source site. The user can iteratively import all the different types of content of their site, for example: pages, blog posts or products in a shop.

The GUI provides a preview site, that is visible onscreen and updated in real time, as content is imported.

The GUI should be smart so that it automatically identifies certain aspects of the source site, to minimize clicks from the user. The user should be able to turn their source site into their new site with as few clicks as possible.

When the user realizes that a certain type of content has not been imported correctly, the GUI should make it possible to easily fix the issue, for all pieces of content of the same type. For example: if the date of blog posts has not been correctly imported, the GUI should make it possible to easily fix it for all blog posts, in an automated fashion.

Once the user has completed the import process into this temporary preview site, they are able to transfer the site to its permanent location, on any WP hosting provider.

Once the user has transferred the site to its permanent location, if they realize some of the content has not been imported correctly, they should be able to fix it, using the same GUI they used when they were fixing issues in the temporary site.

[psrpinto]

@akirk @ashfame I welcome all feedback you might have.

[akirk]

That aligns with my view. Just a couple of notes:

• I'd de-emphasize the real-time updating of the site. It could work but I would prefer potentially just providing links in the extension to update the preview instead refreshing the page all to often.
• An aspect that I felt was only vaguely implied in your description is that we'll want to add some sort of crawl activity which can follow user examples (i.e. you help extract one or two pages, the crawling can do the rest). Because of crawling the live preview might not be feasible.
• I don't think it should be in the scope of the project to provide UI to correct data but to use WordPress features to enable the user to do so, mostly by providing links to the right places in wp-admin.
• It should provide UI to re-run the extraction but I see this based on updated code, for example after we fix a reported bug.

[ashfame]

I would say it's aligned with my view as well. And I agree on Alex's points as well. Correction of data is better handled afterwards within WP context.