Mozilla.com/2011-Rebranding-Project

Overview

This project will rebrand URLs from major Firefox-focused product pages as .org, an effort that will bring clarity to the user experience and overall understanding of Mozilla as a non-profit. Currently, marketing materials direct users to mozilla.org/firefox, which then redirects users to a .com page).

Goals

• Bring European product pages into the current mozilla.com download funnel to take advantage of improvements and optimizations we've made on other locales, and to add a "thank you for downloading" page to the experience. This will return mozilla-europe.org to a community-focused site.
  • Rebrand all European product page URLs mozilla.org/eu, etc.
• Bring Mozilla Messaging into the current mozilla.com experience
  • Rebrand all Mozilla Messaging/Thunderbird product pages as mozilla.org/
• Rebrand all Mozilla.com product pages as mozilla.org

Phases

• Planning
• Phase 1: Rebrand Mozilla Europe
• Phase 2: Rebrand Mozilla Messaging
• Phase 3: Rebrand Mozilla.com
• Future Phase: Site Unification Project

People

• Chrissie Brodigan, Product Owner/TPM
• James Long, WebDev Lead
• Fred Wenzel, WebDev Support
• Jason Grlicky, UX/Mobile
• Pascal Chevrel, Mozilla-Europe
• Rafael Ebron, Mozilla Messaging
• David Boswell, Mozilla.org
• John Slater, Mozilla.com

Meetings

• Meeting, July 21, 2011
• Meeting, July 14, 2011
• Meeting Notes, July 7, 2011
• Meeting, June 30. 2011(cancelled)
• Meeting Notes, June 23, 2011
• Meeting, June 16, 2011 (cancelled)
• "What is Bedrock" meeting, June 15, 2011
• Meeting Notes, June 9, 2011
• Meeting Notes, June 2, 2011

Planning

• Complete Content Inventories for:
  • Mozilla-Europe
  • Mozilla Messaging
  • Mozilla.org
  • Mozilla.com

• Complete Content Stakeholder Interviews for:
  • Mozilla-Europe, Pascal, June 7
  • Mozilla Messaging, Rafael, June 8
  • Mozilla.org, David Boswell, June 9
  • Mozilla.com, John Slater
  • L10N Team, Stas, June 9

• Complete Technical Specification/Plan for Rebranding
  • Mozilla-Europe, James Long, June 16
  • Mozilla Messaging, Rafeal Lebron, June 23
  • Mozilla.org, No rebranding required
    
  • Mozilla.com, James Long, June 23

Bugs

Main tracking bug: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=610724

• [One Mozilla - Tracking Bug] Setup a stage version of the merged mozilla.com/.org using Zeus - https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=670115

• [One Mozilla] Fix conflicting URLs for mozilla.com/.org merge Bug 670114

• [One Mozilla] Post-merge content cleanup of mozilla sites - https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=630967

Analytics

Challenge: Currently, prospect traffic is routed via getfirefox.com or via search engine queries based primarily on language preference and browser type. This presents several major drawbacks:

• inability to report uniformly on website performance for all geographies
• complexity & overhead in maintenance
• underexposure of competitive content (e.g. I.E.-specific content) to all prospects who might find it valuable

Data:

Phase 1: Rebrand Mozilla Europe

This phase involves Pascal heavily since he is the lead of mozilla-europe.org.

There are a few things to note about mozilla-europe.org where it stands today (June 16, 2011):

• All of the content we need from mozilla-europe.org has already been ported to mozilla.com (product pages, release notes, etc)
• mozilla-europe.org is moving to europe.mozilla.org and will become a community-focused site.

What needs to happen next:

1. Pascal will remove the product pages and make new landing pages for all the locales on europe.mozilla.org -a few locales done in July, due date TBD
   1. Add links on europe.mozilla.com landing pages to moz.com product pages (and download buttons?)
   2. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=669915
2. The domain mozilla-europe.org should retain it's community status, and will redirect to europe.mozilla.org - due date TBD
   1. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=664393

Phase 2: Rebrand Mozilla Messaging

• Taken from: http://etherpad.mozilla.com:9000/gamH9Ipveh
• Tracking Bug: 666785
• Mozilla Messaging to mozilla.org/Thunderbird release schedule

Project Complete: Wednesday, June 29, 2011, Mozilla Messaging relaunched as Thunderbird at mozilla.org/thunderbird

Phase 3: Rebrand Mozilla.com

Mozilla.com will be rebranded as mozilla.org. The current mozilla.org content will still be served under mozilla.org. There are many potential problems with this, from conflicting URLs to the drastically different workflows for the sites. First, let's take note of a few things:

• Most of mozilla.org's content doesn't need to live there. A lot of it is wiki-like pages that is already being ported to MDN (or something wiki-like).
• The few pages that do need to live on are static content pages

Eventually, the few important pages on mozilla.org can be re-created in the mozilla.com codebase, and the existing mozilla.org codebase will go away. However, due to the amount of work that needs to be done to transition devs off of mozilla.org, and the minimal gains from waiting to do so, we will not wait to move content off of moz.org, merge mozilla.org pages, change devs workflows, and fix other details to achieve a true merge.

To keep this simple and to achieve the goal of rebranding mozilla.com as .org, we will run the current mozilla.com and mozilla.org codebases side-by-side and tweak how the sites are served.

Idea #1

Use Apache rewrites:

• Move mozilla.org into a subfolder of mozilla.com
• Create a list of top-level folders on mozilla.org
• Use Apache magic to continue serving these folders at the top-level, internally from the mozilla.org subfolder
• Run combined codebase as mozilla.com

You could also simply use proxied rewrites and serve the .org URLs from another domain, rather than a subfolder.

Idea #2

• Create a list of top-level folders on mozilla.org
• Implement rewrites in Zeus to serve the appropriate codebase depending on URL (i.e. anything under /community)

This is even easier then idea #1 and more transparent. This looks like the best solution so far.

Status

Captain's Log, July 8, 2011

I have a prototype of this merge working: http://etherpad.mozilla.com:9000/mozmerge

This implements the above plan. We need to resolve some conflicting URLs and fix a few bugs, but the two sites a running together almost perfectly.

Captain's Log, July 12, 2011

I have a new idea of how to implement the rewrites. Use Zeus instead of Apache, which sits in front of all of our servers and handles caching, load balancing, etc. You can write "site scripts" which is code executed in Zeus per request. Write a site-script which looks at the top-level URL part and serve from the appropriate codebase.

Future

Setup a stage version of the merged mozilla.com/.org using Zeus - https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=670115

We really need to start thinking about these bugs too:

• Post-merge content cleanup of mozilla sites - https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=630967
• Fix conflicting URLs for mozilla.com/.org merge - https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=670114

Future Phase: Site Unification Project

1.) Conduct and produce a  technical inventory of the current moz.com

2.) Read mozilla.com - assimilating mozilla.org http://etherpad.mozilla.com:9000/mozmerge