@misc Thread 7 not talks about OSPO, it is 17. I not wanted to edit your own answer so here my proposal to make it clear and bring the users where you want them, to see what you are talking about 
And since hosting is paid by OSPO (as pointed earlier in the thread 17; months ago),
p.s.
I still do not now exactly what OSPO means, but i guess you talk about them?
OSPO in this context is a branch of Red Hat, which itself is a subsidary of IBM, that funds The Fedora Project and it’s activities. Red Hat OSPO (Open Source Project Office) is the sole funder of The Fedora Project. (Although some hardware might be donated by other companies, and some individuals spend their own money supporting The Fedora Project and it’s activities).
That’s not a branch, that’s a department/team at Red Hat, using RH money, the one where @jflory7 and I (and Shaun, jason and others) work, in charge of helping strategic Open Source (strategic from the perspective of our employer).
We are also not exactly the sole funder inside RH, but because a 20k people company is a gigantic complex bureaucracy, and for the sake of everybody’s mind, I will not dwelve too much on it 
I think the meaning was “earlier in the thread, 7 months ago” rather than “earlier in the thread 7, months ago”.
Both is true, just my version also works from next month on 
To clarify, I was speaking of a message in March, so 7 months ago (as we are in October), 7 wasn’t the message number.
To go back to the issues at hand, the rationales behind moving to Discourse are
As an alternative, it has also been suggested in this thread to merge the Community Blog with Fedora Magazine.
What are your thoughts?
I should clarify what I meant here. I meant the possible scenario where we terminate the contract with the hosting provider, and then there is an expectation for sysadmin-main folks to host a read-only version of the site. My personal view is that it is time to let go of WordPress. This is what I was trying to suggest.
Oh no, you called my bluff. Admittedly, this is a detail that only you, me, and other members of our Red Hat team would know. I was trying to look nice both in our internal Red Hat team and in the public Fedora community for finding ways to win more budget for Fedora. But yeah, I guess this is misleading, because canceling the vendor contract will not actually net me any more dollars for event funding, per se.
So, maybe we should ignore budget here, because I think it is a distraction and it is not really what the proposal is about. The proposal is about the CommBlog is a big ball of burnout, and only one person is really owning the community-facing side of running it.
I would like to avoid this conversation because I don’t think it is relevant for the CommBlog hosting (as you said yourself), and I don’t want us to keep this stuck in discussion. It is time for us to move from discussion to action.
Well, this is not exactly true, as @misc correctly said. I would be happy to discuss this nuance more, but this topic is not the place to do that. Come find me in #council:fedoraproject.org if you want to talk more about this?
The main point I underlined is missing here: there is a challenge with sustaining the Community Blog, and it is a burnout topic for people who have worked on it. We do not have the ability to maintain it well, and it requires bespoke knowledge of PHP to do much meaningful changes to the theme and user interface.
Points 1, 2, and 3 are not actually that important to me here. Point 4 is more relevant, because we need to scale the involvement of more editors. And WordPress persistently gives us papercuts and admin work that have people focus on the less-helpful things (in my observations).
I want to know your thoughts on my point, because I thought me and @bookwar made a clear arguments against this:
When I understand correct you saying that WP is making a descending curve about popularity and so are the webmasters of it. In general fat CMS’es with a heavy DB behind are out. Engines which render a slim static html Site are the trend now.
A time I used Jekyll and was amazed how fast and simple I could generate a blog and content in general. On the weekend I also had a look at hugo which is also such a engine. Both Jekyll and Hugo are available in the Fedora Repository.
The best is that I can use codeberg’s .page sites to have a own blog site/with Hugo (while asking to activate woodpecker). If someone is able to create a own small Fedora blog (eventually on fedorapeople?), this could be a motivation to get into writing docs/magazines. In the end what we do with antora is the same what hugo/jekyll is doing. Rendering .md (markdown) Files into static web content.
I personally see using Fedora Discussion more as a back end to organize the workflow for blog/docs/magazines then as a tool to publish them. Eventually also create some .md files within it while using prepared templates. However promoting tools like Hugo, to create own content and eventually also as an contest once, would more introduce that what we do have already, than promoting a totally a new process.
I also saw this reply (below) from @rokejulianlockhart, which would be a really cool prospect for this project, and that News & Announcements > Community Blog category specifically.
This sounds like a lot of work to make something new. And I also don’t know who will maintain it in the long run? There is a history of things getting dumped on Fedora Infra to run, and if building something new, we should be thoughtful to build something that we can actually maintain for the long run.
My proposal is based on a infrastructure we already have (Fedorapeople). I could write a blogpost on my own space (Codberg or Fedorapeople) how to use Hugo locally and then rsinc to a public space. This way there is no need to have Woodpecker, Runners, Automation scripts etc. to start with.
In the end it is just static html creating locally and move it up to a web-server. The existing wikis for Fedorapeople work fine to make it run.
How about making a own Discourse Instance for Blogging and Magazine Articles? Also with Offtopic/Watercooler section, which new users can use to get into writing/blogging. If needed we could separate in Project based and Community based content. Publishing it as an example under Fedorapeople.org/blog or /writing to not take away the idea of our existing Magazine?
This separate instance could also be used to recruit new Moderators and Admins for Discourse ? Giving Ask/Discussion users the chance to help out there with higher TL level and or Moderator/Admin rights. Users from this instance would then be able to display selected articles in News&Announcements/Community Blog /Magazine.
To be a good writer I do not need to have a lot of technically background. Users with Administration Jobs could get as easy into the community and help faster, with something they are used to do from their Job anyway. While they get also slowly in the tech stuff of Fedora. It is not to divide the community, it is meant to make a lower entry point into something which helps the community to grow.
As an extra, such a new instance could also be used to test if Blogging & Magazine work could be totally made with Discourse. Using it as Plan A, to say we substitute WP in two years, as long nobody comes up with plan B which is easier and faster.
I my opinion, Discourse is not something complicated anymore. A lot of communities use it and gathering information for a product/solution is something “normal” today. And with this “ActivityPub” we probably could also start to include content from upstream projects in our own community without have to sign up there. This could be interesting for Bugs we should report Upstream and also having an active information exchange about it.
I really like the idea of using Fedora infrastructure to host as much as possible.
Open and Free are two things we should always work towards.
Is Discourse totally open and free (at least for selves hosting it)?
Fedora (or a sponsor) pays Discourse to host the site.
However from their github GitHub - discourse/discourse: A platform for community discussion. Free, open, simple.
“Discourse is a 100% open-source community platform for those who want complete control over how and where their site is run.”
My understanding about the Fedora People sites is that they require some sysadmin skills to work with. You need to understand SSH keys, be comfortable working in a command-line window, and understand the existing web resources that you have individually as a Fedora contributor.
Is this correct? Do you need to have some sysadmin skills to use Fedora People?
Do you mean something like MediaWiki? I’m actually not sure what you meant by wikis. I thought it was more or less an Apache web server instance, like with what I host on my Fedora People site:
What would we gain by making a new Discourse site versus a new category or dedicated space on this site for news and announcements? Also, what would be the easiest way to make sure that published news and announcements also end up on this Discourse site too?
I am thinking of two things:
I think this is an amazing idea, but I think part of our original motive for moving from WordPress to Fedora Discussion was that we could do exactly this on Fedora Discussion. Right now, we have a couple of people who help own the Community Blog today. But if we used something like Fedora Discussion, it might be easier for the active folks here to help us curate news and announcements, and possibly even bubble things up from other active discussions too. This way, we could get more visibility on Project Discussion topics that are relevant to more of our contributor community.
The problem we have now is that I don’t think it is fair on @zlopez and others involved to wait two years before we move away from WordPress.
Also, this conversation is specifically about the Community Blog and not the Fedora Magazine. The Magazine team seems content with WordPress and it seems to be working well for them already. So, we shouldn’t fix what isn’t broken. The Community Blog contributor pipeline is broken, so I want to focus in on that specific platform.
Could we do this as a new category here on Fedora Discussion today, without having to spin up a new site and set up the custom integrations we have built into this Discourse site already?
Yes, we could. We even already have the category for published posts. We’d just want to add the workspace/drafting one in Team Workflows . Are there FAS groups for commblog editors already?
I believe that’d be the community-blog FAS group, but please wait for Justin or someone else to confirm 
Oh, and look! That’s already set up here: Community Blog group. I’ve set up Team Workflows > Community Blog Drafts. Currently, members of that group can see and moderate that group. I believe that gives moderators the ability to schedule posts, as well. However, it might need someone who also has mod access here to do the actual publishing… needs a little experimenting.
Does anyone want to help out with trialing this workflow? This sounds like what we want to do, but I don’t have capacity to experiment and figure out how to get it working. That said, this seems like the pathway to get us to a point of retiring the WordPress site for the Community Blog once and for all.