Describe standard operating procedures for technical work.

[codersquid]

We should describe standard operating procedures for technical work. These can live on the wiki unless we want them in a different place.

Here is a possible list of things to document.

• Configuration
  • Pelican settings
  • Any configurations for other tools used by the blog
• Hosting
  • Document settings for the running environment, e.g. nginx conf
  • Document steps for setting up an environment. i.e. starting from a vanilla OS install, document everything that needs to happen to host the blog.
• Deployment
  • Document how deployment works, e.g. if we use post-commit hooks, describe them, and describe what is running on the host to catch them. If we build manually, describe the steps.
• Support
  • Document procedures for detecting and handling production issues.
  • If there is a content problem, document how those are handled
• Technical Contributors
  • List types of contributors and document how to add people as bloggers, admins, reviewers, ...
• Content development process
  • Document the steps we take for creating content all the way to posting it.
  • Document required Pelican fields, optional fields, etc.
• Will we have a style guide for the code and content? What coding conventions do we follow, etc.

[codersquid]

If the issue tracker turns out to be useful, we should also document how issues get handled. It will help for people who are new to using issue trackers. We could explain how maintainers carry an issue through each step from creation to closing. For example

• a user creates an issue
• maintainer sees the issue and does triage
  • this may be something like picking the right label, assigning someone, leaving a comment about how work will get done
• a maintainer or someone who can, watches the issues to make sure they don't go stale (not sure how to automate this)

those are just some ideas based on experiences from other projects. sometime the knowledge is tacit, but we are from different backgrounds and stating things will help.