After experimenting with Discourse I find it much more convenient to write announcements and posts in Discourse than in jenkins.io. Documentation-as-code is great, but Discourse offers a good way to write announcements with WYSIWYG style, with Markdown and previews. As a contributor, I spend much less time to write an announcement or a blog, and hence I can create more valuable content within the same timeframe.
jenkins.io blog is still valuable for users as a blog, but I wonder whether we should introduce a bridge which would allow to write blogs/announcements on Discourse and then easily repost them on the Jenkins blog. We could automate creation of blogs, e.g. by exporting Markdown/Asciidoc, images, and then autogenerating metadata. @halkeye@zbynek@timja have done it for Jenkins Wiki, and there is no reason why we could not make it for Discourse, with automatic pull request creation. Another option would be to just embed Discourse blog into Jenkins.io, e.g. by generating special blog entries at the build time or at the runtime.
There could be multiple options for that. I suggest a quick poll to kick start the discussion:
Keep Discourse announcements and Jenkins Blog separate
Create a tool for automatic conversion of Discourse posts to Jenkins Blogs
Hi Oleg,
Thank you for the suggestion, while I like the idea of writing announcements from Discourse in markdown with direct preview, I would prefer to keep jenkins.io/blog separated. We already have some effort to make discourse the default location for communication instead of the mailing lists, lets not add more confusion about the default rss feed to use.
Instead I would open a Jira ticket, explaining the need and what it solves and maybe in the futur we would work on it
Compared to PRs to jenkins-infra/jenkins.io, we would be missing any notion of moderation that I can see, and any way for copy editors to suggest refinements. I have created blog posts and while it is indeed some work mechanically, others have suggested edits and refinements of various kinds that were invaluable.
Doing a PR for blog post on jenkins.io is a painful exercise for me, tbh. I can also speak for those of us who are not technical but have the need to publish posts. I am all for a more user friendly way to publish posts if we could accommodate jglick’s feedback as I also think having another set of eyes to edit/review posts is valuable.
Could setup a webhook kinda like we do on github, so one of the “moderators” could do !publish and a script would create and publish the post or something. That way blog posts could also still be written as code directly.
I have trouble writing markdown at the best of times, let alone asciidoc. So I almost never contribute to anything on jenkins.io
I’m not sold discourse is the right way to handle this, but I do agree that the github flow sucks.
There’s also https://www.netlifycms.org/ which would allow the exact flow to keep, but gives you a web ui tied to github
Or completely redo it, so site is backed by a full CMS. Gatsby has a wordpress, or contentful (bleh) or any other CMS plugin, then outputs a static site. Keeps runtime nice and fast, and the backend less accessible.
I don’t have any real opinions on how, but as a non writer I don’t like contributing content at all to jenkins.io right now.