This document outlines the short-term (early Q3 2010) plan to merge the Firefox Help for Mobile website with (desktop) Firefox Support.

See also the Kitsune PRD for the long-term plan.

Background

The Mobile support site launched as a separate SUMO website due to it being much simpler to set up, having completely separate support articles, and, to a lesser extent, because it wasn't clear that it would be called Firefox at the time. However, long term, the goal has always been to find a good way to combine the two into one big Firefox support central.

We've since realized that having two separate sites scatters our support community unnecessarily, so it's time to start planning the merge. Once the Android beta ships, there will be much more focus on mobile and it will be critical that we have the support community in the right place by that time to minimize disruption in the future.

Objectives

• Merge the sites before the Android beta ships.
• Reduce the confusion for users as to where to go for help.
• Reduce the amount of l10n work for contributors by having to maintain two separate support sites for what is essentially the same product.
• Eliminate the artificial split of the support community.
• Put more focus on the Mobile support efforts.

Requirements

Articles

• New KB category for Mobile articles.
  • Unfortunately, the staging system can only be a applied to one category (KB) until Kitsune is implemented. Some options: (cilias)
    • Mobile category can be a wiki without review.
    • Make mobile articles only editable by approvers (and up).
    • Put the mobile articles in the KB category, and create an additional category (Firefox 3.0, Linked from in-product, Troubleshooting article, etc.) for mobile.
• Searches may or may not include Mobile articles; see below about the start page.
  • To avoid confusion and name conflicts, Mobile articles should be prefixed (or postfixed) with "Mobile", e.g. "Mobile: How to use the Location Bar"
    • Instead of the "Mobile:" prefix, how about adding "on Firefox for mobile" to the names (e.g. "How to navigate Web pages on Firefox for mobile")? Some of them don't need renaming, like "How to install Firefox on N900". That should make titles easier for users to understand. (cilias)
    • Alternatively, articles for Mobile will not show up in search results in which case the prefix will not be necessary since articles will only be linked to from the mobile start page anyway.

Start page

• A mobile-specific support start page, similar to the current mobile start page, but with less emphasis on the search box.
  • Because the number of articles for Mobile is still very low, the start page could simply list all (currently 12) articles.
  • There should be a prominent link from the mobile start page to ask support questions in the forum.

Support forum

• For user-to-user support, we will be using the new support forum.
  • The Ask a new question dialog in the forum will have to have an option for Mobile support in the first step, to ensure that we add the appropriate "mobile" tag to the post. E.g. "I have a problem with Firefox on my mobile device."
  • Contributors, members of the Mobile team and other interested will be able to create custom searches showing only the mobile related support questions, just like they do today in the mobile support forum. RSS feeds for these questions will also be possible.

Other

• Redirects will be created from the old mobile site.
• Product links should be updated in Fennec.
• Articles (including localized versions) can be migrated manually by SUMO team because they are so few.
• Some UI has been translated by localizers but not much. And there may be overlap with UI strings on the desktop site. It may be best not to bother migrating that work.

Long-term plan

The merge outlined in this document will still be based on the existing TikiWiki-based SUMO platform for the knowledge base. The long-term plan is to rewrite the SUMO support platform from scratch in Django, which is projected to be ready by Q4. Details about the mobile support integration will be found in the Kitsune PRD.

Timeline

• File bug to migrate mobile forum to support questions [Bug 586457]
• File bug to migrate mobile users [Bug 586735]
• Create mobile start page template [Bug 586006]
• Lock the mobile support forum and point users to SUMO support forum [2010-08-26]
• Put an announcement on mobile support forum about the plan to migrate.
• Email regular contributors
• Add a mobile category on SUMO [2010-8-30]
• SUMODEV mobile merge push [2.2.4] [Week of 2010-8-30]
• Copy over mobile English articles, changing titles when necessary. [2010-09-17]
• Copy over localized versions of the articles [2010-09-17]
  • Kadir will notify localizers that we'll be copying over articles and translations.
  • Copy over localized mobile articles. Append title with "mobile."
  • Create new revision with Android sections added to the articles (part of the extend support to Android goal)
  • Ask localizers to create new titles and update articles with Andriod info.