Domains, URLs and SSL on WordCamp.org

One of the things we would like to have for WordCamp.org is SSLSSL Secure Socket Layer - Encryption from the server to the browser and back. Prevents prying eyes from seeing what you are sending between your browser and the server. everywhere. This is something that WordPress Community team members, along with many WordCampWordCamp WordCamps are casual, locally-organized conferences covering everything related to WordPress. They're one of the places where the WordPress community comes together to teach one another what they’ve learned throughout the year and share the joy. Learn more. organizers, have been talking about for years, and now we finally have the resources to actually make it happen. Unfortunately the URLURL A specific web address of a website or web page on the Internet, such as a website’s URL www.wordpress.org structure we came up years ago doesn’t really allow us to easily enable SSL, without having to deal with wildcard certificates for every city that hosts a WordCamp, which is also not scalable as we grow.

To address that, we would like to change WordCamp website URLs structure from year.city.wordcamp.org to city.wordcamp.org/year which will allow us to use a single wildcard certificate to cover all current and any future WordCamp cities. We came up with a little roadmap for this change that we hope to start rolling out very soon:

  1. Convert one or two past WordCamps to the new URL structure
  2. Have a couple WordCamps in new cities adopt the new structure from the start
  3. With the help of community volunteers convert and test all past and scheduled WordCamps to the new URL structure
  4. Enable the wildcard SSL certificate for the whole network
  5. When we’re confident enough, disable HTTPHTTP HTTP is an acronym for Hyper Text Transfer Protocol. HTTP is the underlying protocol used by the World Wide Web and this protocol defines how messages are formatted and transmitted, and what actions Web servers and browsers should take in response to various commands. entirely and redirect all requests to HTTPSHTTPS HTTPS is an acronym for Hyper Text Transfer Protocol Secure. HTTPS is the secure version of HTTP, the protocol over which data is sent between your browser and the website that you are connected to. The 'S' at the end of HTTPS stands for 'Secure'. It means all communications between your browser and the website are encrypted. This is especially helpful for protecting sensitive data like banking information.

Converting a WordCamp site to the new structure also means redirecting all existing URLs to their new location, so things like direct links to announcements, speaker bios, schedules, video wrap-ups and everything else will continue to work, probably including hot-linked media as well.

At the final stage of this project we would also like to finally create landing sites for each city, with a list of past and scheduled events. These will live on the main city.wordcamp.org domain and they will be single-page sites. We’re working on creating the initial structure for such sites and we’ll give WordCamp organizers an opportunity to further personalize them with banners and/or logos.

We haven’t set a date for all these changes yet, but as mentioned, we’d like to push them out very soon. If you have any feedback, questions or concerns, please leave a comment. If you’re a WordCamp organizer and would like to help out with this roadmap, please don’t hesitate to reach out. We hang out in #community on SlackSlack Slack is a Collaborative Group Chat Platform https://slack.com/. The WordPress community has its own Slack Channel at https://make.wordpress.org/chat/..

#wordcamp-org, #wordcamps