Merge pull request #351 from tobyhodges/sunsetting-styles-support-inc…

…ubator

Post about ending styles support in the Incubator

content/posts/2025/01/sunsetting-styles-support-incubator.md

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+---
+layout: page
+authors: ["Toby Hodges"]
+teaser: "All lessons in The Carpentries Incubator will use our current lesson infrastructure by the end of 2025"
+title: "Ending Support for _styles_ in the Incubator"
+Date: 2025-01-14
+time: "09:00:00"
+tags: ["Curriculum", "The Carpentries Incubator", "The Carpentries Workbench"]
+---
+
+Our lesson infrastructure, [The Carpentries Workbench](https://carpentries.github.io/workbench/), was [rolled out](/blog/2023/08/celebrating-carpentries-workbench/) across all Data Carpentry, Library Carpentry, and Software Carpentry lessons in May 2023.
+The Workbench replaced our previous lesson infrastructure, a [Jekyll](https://jekyllrb.com/)-based template (augmented by scripts and other resources developed by the community) affectionately known as _styles_.
+The product of several years of work by [Zhian Kamvar](https://zkamvar.netlify.app/), the Workbench made a number of improvements over styles, e.g. by bringing lesson sites up to at least [WCAG AA standards](https://www.w3.org/WAI/WCAG2AA-Conformance) in web accessibility, and making local installation of the infrastructure significantly easier on most community members' systems.
+
+![The Carpentries Workbench combines three R packages: sandpaper, pegboard, and varnish](/blog/2025/01/img/workbench-hex-collection.jpeg)
+
+Since then, The Carpentries team has stopped maintaining the previous _styles_ infrastructure and [a documented transition workflow was published](https://carpentries.github.io/sandpaper-docs/migrating-from-styles.html) to help community members migrate their own lesson projects to use the Workbench.
+The Carpentries Curriculum Team has been helping lesson developers with this process over the past 18 months, and community members, [Aleksandra Nenadic](https://github.com/anenadic) and [Matthew Bluteau](https://github.com/bielsnohr), facilitated a session to transition more lessons at [CarpentryConnect Heidelberg](https://biont-training.eu/CarpentryConnect2024.html) in November 2024.
+
+The Carpentries supports the community's development of new lessons in [The Carpentries Incubator](https://carpentries-incubator.org/).
+The Incubator hosts more than 150 of the community's lesson projects, from brand new lessons that are just getting started, through to polished and thoroughly-tested lessons that have been submitted for peer review in [The Carpentries Lab](https://carpentries-lab.org/).
+
+These community-owned lessons use a mix of the old and new infrastructures: we estimate that 60 Incubator lessons are using the Workbench, which leaves a lot of projects that are using the unsupported _styles_ infrastructure.
+To ensure that the Curriculum Team is able to support Incubator developers with their lessons -- and to help these developers take advantage of the improvements offered by the Workbench -- we will end support for the previous infrastructure in The Carpentries Incubator on 31 December, 2025.
+**Any lesson repositories still using _styles_ in The Carpentries Incubator after the end of this year will be archived.**
+
+## Supporting Workbench Transitions for Incubator Lessons
+The process of migrating lessons from _styles_ to the Workbench is not straightforward, and many community members have found the workflow difficult and time consuming to set up and run without support.
+Furthermore, since this is a process that only needs to be run once, the investment of time and effort may be too great for some.
+
+In recognition of this, the Curriculum Team will support the transition of Incubator lessons to use the Workbench over the next 12 months.
+
+### Workbench Transition Coworking Sessions
+To help Incubator developers migrate their own lessons to the Workbench, the Curriculum Team will host monthly online Workbench Transition Coworking Sessions on the last Monday of each month. 
+You can find the details of these sessions on [the community calendar](https://carpentries.org/community/events/) and [the Community Events Etherpad](https://pad.carpentries.org/community-sessions-2025).
+
+Join these sessions to ask questions and get help with the process of migrating a lesson project/projects from _styles_ to the Workbench.
+
+### Request help with a lesson transition
+Alternatively, Incubator developers can ask the Curriculum Team to transition their lesson to the Workbench.
+The team's capacity is limited so transitions may not happen quickly, but we will try to complete them as requested.
+[Open an issue using the request form template](https://github.com/carpentries/lesson-transition/issues/new?assignees=tobyhodges&labels=&projects=&template=incubator-transition-request.yml&title=REQ%3A+) to ask the Curriculum Team to transition your lesson.