Add NEWS

[pat-s]

The possibility of updating the theme without touching personal changes is a really great! While new features can be viewed in the git log when updating, it would be helpful to have a NEWS.md file which tracks all new features and provides some short information.

Everybody can then review the recently merged updates and apply these to their site.

Another possibility would also to provide releases for your theme and set feature goals for each version. You could (for example) say that you only update the theme once a month with all features/ideas collected within that period.

You could also link new example posts (like the planned one on wercker integration) within that NEWS.

Keep on rocking and supportive as you are atm :smiley:

[gcushen]

Thanks for the feedback!

With website themes/frameworks, most of the changes are very minor, so git log with the one line summary or full description options should generally provide enough info.

When the Academic project began, I started creating releases (as I do with my other more complicated projects), but I soon discovered that it becomes too cluttered with all the minor commits and takes too much of my time to reference all the commits. Sure, a monthly release would improve some aspects of this, but if there is a little bug or a nice improvement, I would rather users get the update sooner.

I recently started a similar thing to Academic Release News here (and it's linked from the Upgrade section of the latest Github Readme): https://github.com/gcushen/hugo-academic/wiki/Release-Notes

To improve things further in this respect, possibly I could consider creating a monthly email newsletter (if users are interested?) and/or posting more often on my Twitter about Academic updates.

[pat-s]

Releases are not really needed yeah, you can also just do a wiki tracking as you already started. Most of the time wikis are overseen (like I did just now) and NEWS.md can be tracked more easily by users? Maybe thats just my impression as I program in R and there its common to do a NEWS.md file for a package.

A monthly newsletter would be nice but a lot of work I guess which you might get tired of. I´m fine with a wiki tracking or a NEWS.md file. Additionally it would be super good if you could expand the info on new features, e.g. the 2017-01-17: Code highlighting options added to config.toml with some examples or linked PR etc. so that the user quickly gets the change and how it can be implemented 👍 (I know, that´s a lot of small things inheriting a lot of work :smiley:)

I´m curious which way you´ll choose and fine with any :)

[howardm]

I, for one, would really appreciate an up-to-date News.md file or Wiki entry, that describes the new feature(s) and, perhaps, provides an example screenshot, for example.

Thanks!

Howard

[pat-s]

pushing this again - there was a lot going on in the last months and I would love to see an up-to-date NEWS.md / NEWS wiki :)

[howardm]

On May 31, 2017, at 4:07 PM, Patrick Schratz notifications@github.com wrote:

pushing this again - there was a lot going on in the last months and I would love to see an up-to-date NEWS.md / NEWS wiki https://github.com/gcushen/hugo-academic/wiki/Release-Notes :)

Hi,

Yes, I agree. I know I’m not aware of the status of all the wonderful work you’ve all been doing.

Howard Mann

[HughP]

A completely different approach might be to do something like homebrew does. That is, when a hugo academic user types in hugo server --watch if the git version has has been updated on github and does not match the version being used locally then output to the terminal "new version available; you have been using xyz but the current version is abc read the differences here: https://github.com/gcushen/hugo-academic/commits/master"

[gcushen]

@HughP thanks for the suggestion :)

Going forward, information on updates will be published here: https://sourcethemes.com/academic/tags/updates

The first update concerning the upcoming v0.30.0 release can be found here: https://sourcethemes.com/academic/post/v0.30.0/ . Note that currently it only shows the changes since the v0.29.0 release. I hope to retrospectively tag previous release versions and publish their corresponding update logs in order to help those long time users update who have not updated in a while. If you'd like to help, feel free to submit issues or PRs to the demo/documentation website repository at https://github.com/sourcethemes/academic-www .

I'm aware there have been a lot of changes since the start of 2017, and I hope the above is helpful. However, there is still a lot I would like to do to improve the updating experience to make it as intuitive as possible and to make new update notifications easily visible to users.

[pat-s]

Great! Could you also place a link in the README?