New Forum, Blog and User Guide Website

• Community Forum
• User Guide website
• Blog

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The new forum URL is https://community.openenergymonitor.org

Here's a preview of the new site:

1. New Community Forum

The current OpenEnergyMonitor Forums have been running on Drupal 6 since 2010.

In February 2016, Drupal 6 reached EOL. This does not mean that the site will stop working. However, it does mean we have decided the time has come to upgrade the highest traffic and
most interactive part of the site, i.e. The Community Forums.

Later this week on 5th May 2016, this forum will be frozen and all subsequent activity will move to the new forum. This forum will remain online for reference purposes only. The new forum is powered by Discourse, an open-source platform hosted on our servers and managed by the OpenEnergyMonitor project.

You will need to create an account on the new forum. You should receive an email soon, inviting you to the new forum. If you join via the link in the email, you will receive elevated privileges on the new forum i.e. the email indicates you are a registered user of the old forum.

Thanks a lot to the team of community volunteers who have prepared the new forum over the past few weeks.

2. New User-Guide

https://guide.openenergymonitor.org

OpenEnergyMonitor.org contains a wealth of information (specifically the Building Blocks resources section), however a common issue raised by new users is they feel lost, swimming in a sea of information. The user guide has been created to provide just the right amount of information to set up and configure an OpenEnergyMonitor system. The guide is focused on the emonPi but will also cover emonBase (Raspberry Pi + RFM69Pi), emonTx and emonTH.

The launch of the Guide site coincides with the launch of the new emonSD Raspberry Pi / emonPi / emonBase pre built image. The new package includes the latest version of Emoncms as well as MQTT, nodeRED, openHAB and Raspberry Pi 3 support, all set up and pre-configured. This new emonSD image will be installed as standard with all emonPi/emonBases shipped from our store in the next few weeks. We will soon be selling the Raspberry Pi 3 as standard with emonPi / emonBase. Another blog post on this coming soon..

The User Guide site will attempt to create a distinction between ‘user’ documentation and ‘developer’ documentation / discussions. The Guide site has been designed to look and work on mobile devices. We think this is important since stats indicated users often follow the setup guide on a mobile or tablet while at the installation site (think head stuck inside a meter cabinet!). Going forward, we would like to standardise on the following locations for documentation:

User Guide Site - User documentation
Forums - User support / Developer discussion separated into categories.
GitHub - Technical documentation

The Hardware Wiki will still exist, however, expect hardware documentation to move to the GitHub Hardware Repo over time.

3. New Blog

https://blog.openenergymonitor.org

We have wanted to move away from our old Google blogger for a while. During the process of building the Guide website, I realised using GitHub and Jekyll would be a good solution for the blog. Thanks to Google export and a nice Jekyll import script, we managed to migrate the blog to the new site without too much difficulty. Please update your RSS subscription to the new feed.

Technical info:

The new Guide and Blog are built using the Jekyll static site generator with Octopress Oscailte theme to convert markdown files to html. The sites are fully open-source, on GitHub, and are hosted by GitHub pages. Travis CI has been configured to rebuild the static HTML pages each time a change commit is made. Hosting the site on github will make it easy for anyone to propose a change/fix. The site is served and secured via Cloud Flare using CF’s Universal SSL/TLS to origin.