Nitro Porter: How'd this begin?

[linc]

Cross-post from Vanilla Forums Open Source:

When I reflect on my decade working on Vanilla Forums, there are a handful of ideas that really stand out to me as having stood the test of time. Today, I wanna talk about just one of them: the Vanilla Porter. Todd came up with the idea to write to a generic intermediary format to simplify the import process. I rewrote our earliest importers to work this way, and we came up with a great open source utility for data portability. It's so good that even Discourse used it as a key step in their migration process for many years (I suspect they and others still do, tbh).

Here's what I've been thinking about:

1. Vanilla Porter hasn't been released in 2 years (when I departed). It's pretty clear no one internally cares about it beyond its internal utility for ongoing migration work, and I do not have repo access to work on it.
2. There's nothing that ties Vanilla Porter to the Vanilla project per se. It's just a great, standard way of approaching data portability between community products.
3. It has zero test coverage and hasn't had any significant maintenance in over five years. It's a bit of a nightmare to release, tbh.
4. Its readily available documentation / marketing is basically zero. I think it could be a lot bigger if that was a priority.

I'm planning to re-brand it as a standalone data portability tool, start doing overdue maintenance work, and set up a standalone website for it. I don't make any promises about the pace at which I'll do this work; it's just something I feel like tinkering with occasionally.

So why bother?

1. I think data portability for communities is super important. As we often said in the early days at Vanilla: It's YOUR data.
2. I want to eventually expand the tooling as a way to counteract the growing trend toward walled-garden communities from which you cannot easily retrieve your data.
3. Data portability doesn't threaten any legitimate business model. It should be a common interest for all community providers that aren't trying to monopolize the industry.
4. I'm heavily invested in the project already and think it could have a bright future. It's an "easy lift", relatively speaking, as an open source project for me to adopt.

If anyone else is interested in working on this with me, let me know!

[linc]

Here's how I spent my first month on Nitro Porter:

• Transitioned to Composer and PSR-4.
• Added linting, PHPUnit, and PSR-12.
• Added Phing build and CI via Actions.
• Added Code of Conduct + security policy.
• Removed jQuery and lots of dead code.
• Created a static site with GH Pages.
• Added a data seeding tool.
• Refactored packages into separate methods.
• Rebranded repo and UI to Nitro Porter.