GCC2022

Nick Stoler, Penn State University (presenting)
Dannon Baker, Johns Hopkins University
Beatriz Serrano-Solano, University of Freiburg
Björn Grüning, University of Freiburg

​Last year, we replaced the system powering the Galaxy Community Hub with a modern static site generator. The new Hub is author-friendly, fast, and built on Vue.js, allowing easy development of custom components and integration with Galaxy's Vue frontend.

But the Hub at galaxyproject.org is not the only Galaxy community website. Galaxy communities and Galaxy servers around the world have their own homes on the web. These websites are regional, but much of their content is relevant to a global audience. This leads to a duplication of effort: many features are reinvented and much content (e.g. events, articles) is posted on multiple sites. In order to reduce this duplication and make galaxyproject.org a truly global hub for the entire Galaxy community, we developed a system to host every Galaxy community under a single domain. Now, anyone can cross-post an event to any of the regional groups by simply adding a tag. Community leaders can still accept or reject submissions with the commonly agreed-upon Github-based review process. Every community automatically gets its own homepage and news feed, and as many content pages as they'd like. The system is easily expandable: new communities can be added with an edit to a single configuration file. This gives an extremely low-overhead way for a community to establish their home on the web. In addition to the US, we currently have preliminary support for the EU region and seven EU subregions.

Our new system allows sharing Galaxy news and events across the global community while also providing each region their own exclusive home, all under the same roof. This means we get a central place for Galaxy information, forging closer ties between communities, while still providing for their independence.