Proposal to move Community Blog to Fedora Discussion

News & Announcements Community Blog
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Originally published at: Proposal to move Community Blog to Fedora Discussion – Fedora Community Blog

Hello readers of community blog!

Recently on community blog round table meeting we had an interesting conversation about the future of community blog and we would like to hear your feedback on that discussion.

What is this change about? We would like to move from your wordpress instance to discussions.fedoraproject.org as new category with new team of curators. Why this change you ask? Here is the list of improvements that this would bring us:

  • Simpler editor workflow – this could potentially help us to get more editors for community blog and the actual reviews should be faster
  • One place to read the blog posts – we are currently forwarding all the blog posts to discussions anyway and this is also used to enable comments for blog posts
  • One less service to maintain – we are already maintaining and using discussions as Fedora and maintaining wordpress instance on top of that for community blog is more work that is not adding much

Here is the space for your feedback. Do you think this is a good idea? What would you miss on discussions.fedoraproject.org compared to wordpress instance. Please let us know in comments.

If you want to be a potential curator for new community blog let us know in the comments as well.

14 Likes
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+1 from me. I think that having a separate site creates a barrier for comments. And people who read the community blog are most likely also users of discussion.fp.o.

A potential problem I see is that people might be subscribed to the rss feed and not notice the switch. So if the move happens, it’d be nice to warn people. Maybe an article about the move on the old site, so that people using rss get a notification, and a follow-up two months later to remind any stragglers to move.

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+1

Having so many sites is really confusing for new (and established) users.

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+1 ok

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Simplifying is always good.

Will we simply fie the URL too? Like blog.fp.o as we still do have an alias to ask.fp.o ?

There will be still some restrictions and rules to make a blog post, right? It is just a platform change?

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If it’s well executed, it could be good.

+1 from me

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This is still a bit early, but adding redirect is not difficult.

The restrictions will still be around. We will probably need to update the blog post workflow to reflect the changes. But there will be still a team of editors and maintainers that will be responsible for the community blog. For writers hopefully it will be just platform change.

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Are you going to prototype what it will look like?
Going from wordpress to discuss will change how the site looks.

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Yes, It is possible to style a category separate with the body tag:

// put main theme here

body.category-support {
 // paste another theme here
}

Some hand styling will be needet.

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Great idea! +1 from me!

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Is someone actively maintaining the WordPress instance on a Fedora distro? I’m not sure if Fedora project has any other WP instances or how the blog is hosted exactly, but it seems like a cool idea to keep the WP instance to maintain how Fedora handles a WordPress set-up.

I like this and it looks similar to what FreeBSD forums do when linking to other blogs: Blogs and Newsfeeds | The FreeBSD Forums

I’m not against moving the blog to Discussion nor really see any downsides for viewing news, but I’m also fine with stuff as it is now with the redirect. However, I never knew that community blog existed, and it has a lot of whitespace bordering; I’m thinking posts would look better on Discussion.

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Since this is the first time I’m hearing about the Community Blog, I think it would be a great addition to Fedora Discussion.

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Since it appears you can just append “.rss” to a category page on discourse to get the RSS feed, this seems fine, as long as some post is placed in the old feed to help folks update their feed readers. I already added the news & announcements category to mine. A few other projects (some in the fedora ecosystem) already use discourse as their blog, software release announcement channel, etc and seem to get lots of engagement on them as long as their discussion forums are active.

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fedoramagazine.org is another WP instance is Fedora, although better maintained than communityblog.fedoraproject.org.

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There will still be a lot of discussion around this as the work is still in early phases.

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Generally supportive as an improvement. As an occasional user of the Community Blog I could not see much added value. A curated section on Fedora Discussion would seem to offer similar benefits and reduce maintenance costs/workflows a bit. As others point out, it will be beneficial to see and work with a proof of concept.

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Just FYI, I think both instances are running in wordpress.com and
managed by OSPO, so I would think they are supported to a similar
amount.

But anyhow, I’m definitely in favor of trying a test setup for this and
seeing if it can replace the wordpress instance. It’s a great idea.

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I proposed the same thing for the CentOS blog some time ago. The feedback I got from the community was that the tech press watches the blog closely, and they don’t watch Discourse. Of course they could always just subscribe the the RSS feed of a category, but will they? I still like the idea of consolidating, but you should think about your stakeholders and make sure they’re satisfied with the change.

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To be precise, they are both running on WPengine (the other side of the current feud between Wordpress founder and a hoster).