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MTG / freesound

The Freesound website
https://freesound.org
GNU Affero General Public License v3.0
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Use forum for blogging (and get rid of wordpress!) #1098

Open ffont opened 6 years ago

ffont commented 6 years ago

As a Freesound admin I want to be able to post blog entries with an editor that allows me to proper format the entries (including uploading images)

As a Freesound user I want to be able to easily post replies to blog post using my Freesound user account instead of registering a new account in the blog site

As a Freesound user I want to be able to get blog updates via RSS feed

As a Freesound maintainer I want to get rid of the dedicated wordpress site for the blog so there is less maintenance work to do

After some discussion we had we agreed that we could easily get rid of the wordpress server if we adapt our current Forums app and add some features to support blogging. The idea is to create a special forum called "Blog" in which only admins can start threads. Non-admin users can use the forum normally by replying to posts, but can't start new threads. This forum would be used by admins as the blog, and the blog entries from the homepage would be retrieved from the forum instead of from the wordpress site.

The only two wordpress features that we'd currently lose by making this change would be:

The first feature we would re-gain it after the implementation of https://github.com/MTG/freesound/issues/1097, therefore this issue should only be implemented after https://github.com/MTG/freesound/issues/1097 is done.

The second feature we should implement it from scratch and should be part of this issue. We are not sure how many users really use this feed, but we should consider adding redirects to old https://blog.freesound.org/?feed=rss2 feed link to the new RSS feed.

Also as part of this issue we should migrate all the existing content from the wordpress blog the new forum-based blog. This means forum posts (including images) and comments. The comments will require some guessing of usernames/emails to match wordpress accounts with Freesound accounts. Also we should add redirection for old blog.freesound.org//?p=X links to new https://freesound.org/forum/blog/Y/ links (so we should store original wordpress ID in post model somehow).

bdejong commented 6 years ago

As you know I'm always rather radical in these things: I would leave out all of the "corner data". No links to old forum posts, no RSS feeds, no translated comments, only translate the actual blog posts. But as said I'm quite radical here. At least the RSS feeds I would base on numbers of users using that feature. Can we measure that?

That said, there are definitely features we do use in the current wordpress:

And there is one feature I would love to introduce: guest editor posts! This would require adding permissions for specific users.

ffont commented 6 years ago

As you know I'm always rather radical in these things: I would leave out all of the "corner data". No links to old forum posts, no RSS feeds, no translated comments, only translate the actual blog posts. But as said I'm quite radical here. At least the RSS feeds I would base on numbers of users using that feature. Can we measure that?

I guess we should check the access logs in the blog machine.

That said, there are definitely features we do use in the current wordpress:

  • sharing an unpublished blog post with other admins for editing

That's right, this should be added. Need some way of having a post as draft and not display it. We could use the "moderated" flag as a work around, but best thing is to add another flag.

  • (maybe?) a way to separate the summary from the main body of the post. At least this is used to show the "short items" on the front page

This can be done automatically as it is done right now.

And there is one feature I would love to introduce: guest editor posts! This would require adding permissions for specific users.

Nice! the cool thing would be to be able to issue a link with a code which lets you create one post or something like that.