Hi!
The design recommendation from the design team suggests adding the CommBlog posts to the Fedora start page.
If you want that, I will need you to install a custom plugin on the Fedora Community Blog WordPress instance.
Thanks!
I’m pretty indifferent to the idea. I don’t feel like the people who would use start.fedoraproject.org as their home page are the target audience for Community Blog posts. That’s entirely a hunch, though, so 
I’ll install the plugin in the next few days.
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It would be nice if the posts could be separated instead of combined into a single stream. The audience for each publication is very different (i.e. users versus contributors).
I do like the general idea of getting CommBlog content published there though.
I am one of said users. 
They can be separated. I was mainly concerned that if they were separate, the slower-moving feeds would hog valuable space. That, and I was thinking that there might get to be too much content on the page if we have separate rows for everything and we add more feeds such as the Announcements feed from this forum and (possibly) the podcasts feed. (4 feeds x 4 entries per row = 16 items, several of which would remain unchanged for months at a time.)
Also, by combining them, I was able to make a resize-able grid that could flow between being 2x6, 3x4, or 4x3 as needed depending on the screen size. This allows the content to scale better on different sized displays. If they are distinct rows of 4 items, I could only do 4x1 and 2x2.
I’d rather leave it out than have it mixed with Magazine. We want to make it very clear what is user-targeted and what is contributor-targeted.
OK. In that case. I might want to change the PERPAGE constant in the plugin down to 4 just to save a little bandwidth. But it can easily be changed after it is installed through WordPress’ built-in plugin editor. (It was set to 12 with the idea that if other services/feeds were offline, extra entries could be read from whatever feeds were still available to fill in until the other services came back online.)
If we’re looking to convert users into contributors, I think we should consider CommBlog being on this start page in some way. Besides little calls to action to join the community as you go along the new website, there isn’t much to tell you what is going on with the contributor side of Fedora. A new user may not think to look it up any further. However, if CommBlog was on this start page, that would be one more impression, this time with specifics on what’s going on, and some of that might interest them. “Join as a contributor” is a nebulous call to action. “Here’s an upcoming Test Day” is much clearer and will perk the ears of those who would be interested in that specific space.
This whole opinion is just a hunch on my end as well, so I’m not claiming it’ll have a dramatic or even noticeable impact. But it would be one more nudge to consider doing something more than just using the distro.
Secondarily, from a marketing perspective, it does communicate that Fedora is more than just a project that makes a distro. Some people like to know that the organizations they support are doing things they think are cool even if they don’t plan on engaging with that. For example, most people may not be super interested in the Fedora elections that are happening right now, but they do like that Fedora is having elections. It makes us look like a bonafide community (which we are) and that can be validating for someone who wants to think more of Fedora. They’re not picking Fedora because we have elections, but it’s cool that we have elections. How meaningful this is I also don’t know, but it is something I think about for content.
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Plugin installed and activated.
Joseph makes some good points. I’d be okay with adding the Community Blog to the start page so long as it’s separate from Magazine content and ideally less attention-grabbing. i.e. title/link only, no featured image)
… I’d be okay with adding the Community Blog to the start page so long as it’s … less attention-grabbing. …
Well, I kept getting comments from the Documentation team that having their links in the right-hand sidebar and below the Latest Solved Issues block was too subdued. So would that placement be subdued enough for the CommBlog posts?
Here is what the start page looks like on my local build (Once it is on fedoraproject.org, the Latest Solved Issues block will populate and push the CommBlog further down the page.)
If you want to change things (icons, subtext, number of entries, etc.) just let me know.
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What happened to the start page? I didn’t think it would end up looking this busy. Maybe it looks better on mobile or something.
You can turn off the sidebars if you prefer by appending ?sidebars=0. More options to customize the appearance can probably be added if you have ideas. It was the design team’s idea to add the CommBlog. I think it looks OK personally. But yeah, it might depend on how large your screen is and I can see where some feeds might be more interesting to some than others.
Thanks for the config info. I do have a large-ish monitor, so it just looks like a lot of stuff ATM. I don’t really mind the change, it sort of took me by surprise when I landed on the fedoraproject start page. So I felt compelled to comment I guess.
Edit: Tried the sidebars off and like it better for me, thanks again.
Another option that may or may not improve the appearance depending on the physical size of your monitor as compared to its screen resolution would be to zoom out a bit to increase the whitespace between the columns and make the page look less crowded. I think the browser should remember zoom settings per-site. But it would affect all fedoraproject.org pages.
Yeah I guess, but I don’t think my monitor settings are the problem.
Based on the few mentions of the new start page I’ve seen on Mastodon, people are liking it. 
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