Congratulations again to @IATI-techteam for all the hard work done on the new website!
When the website was launched in July a few of us requested that the old website be archived rather than deleted. This is important not just for historical interest but also for resolving current discussions. We were assured by the Secretariat that:
It is great to see that a lot of this has been done in the Archive section of the new website (copying the Archive section of the old website).
However, from a quick look it appears there are still files that will be lost (or links that will be broken and hard to work out where the file has gone to) in switching off the new website. For example:
- the cost/benefit analysis from 2009 has a number of references to files that I could not find at all on the new website
- the 2017 Annual Report news article links to files that can be found elsewhere on the site but the links in that article would be broken.
- the minutes of the 2017 MA PDF has the same issue (files it refers to can probably be found but links would be broken)
- I eventually realised past Steering Committee documents appear to be attached to individual events (e.g.), but this was quite hard to work out and to discover the location of these documents. Any internal links in documents would also be broken. Perhaps the events could be linked to from this page?
Aside from broken links, my major concern is with documents that we don’t realise we’ve deleted or removed access to. All the issues I found were to do with files that currently sit in wp-content/uploads on the old website.
I think the easiest way of solving all these issues would be to copy the contents of wp-content/uploads from the old website and make it accessible from the same URLs in the new website (through redirects). This should be a super simple job and would save a lot of important historical material. It would be good to also check if there are any other folders containing a significant amount of important files but I imagine this one folder should capture pretty much everything.
Can the Secretariat confirm that aidtransparency.net will not be switched off until all these files are safely stored and made accessible through the new website without breaking links? Thanks!!
