Deploy blog.whatwg.org via DigitalOcean apps

[domenic]

This seems to work: https://blog-6tqz3.ondigitalocean.app/.

However it's a bit hard to test things because WordPress has a very strong notion of what its own URL is, which I believe is stored in the database. So every link on that staging site actually ends up going to the original https://blog.whatwg.org/. I can't access the admin panel either.

It looks like maybe we could get a better test by setting some extra config settings https://wordpress.org/support/article/changing-the-site-url/ so I'll probably try that tomorrow.

[domenic]

It looks like maybe we could get a better test by setting some extra config settings https://wordpress.org/support/article/changing-the-site-url/ so I'll probably try that tomorrow.

I tried that today and I still can't really get it to work. I think it's hard-coded into the database, hmm.

Maybe we should try the approach in https://wordpress.org/support/article/changing-the-site-url/#wp-cli so we can confirm the blog is really working on the staging URL. The alternate approach is to just try to switch things over and see what happens, I guess.

[foolip]

@domenic I would try deploying this to staging.blog.whatwg.org with the necessary hack (edit database dump?) to change the URL that WordPress expects. If that's deployed correctly, I think we should just switch over.

[domenic]

Something is wrong with some of the posts linewrapping, e.g.:

• https://blog-6tqz3.ondigitalocean.app/feed-autodiscovery vs. https://blog.whatwg.org/feed-autodiscovery
• https://blog-6tqz3.ondigitalocean.app/drm-and-web-security vs. https://blog.whatwg.org/drm-and-web-security

My best guess is that something about the default WordPress installation converts \ns into <br>s, and maybe something about our plugins stops that?

[domenic]

https://benohead.com/blog/2013/02/15/wordpress-remove-addtional-line-breaks/ seems promising...

[domenic]

I see, it's our Text Control plugin, which seems a bit more involved:

[domenic]

OK, here's what I've done:

• Sent https://github.com/whatwg/blog.whatwg.org/pull/4 to reproduce Text Control without actually using a plugin. It works.
• Used the instructions at https://wpbeaches.com/updating-wordpress-mysql-database-after-moving-to-a-new-url/ to update our DigitalOcean database to use the https://blog-6tqz3.ondigitalocean.app/ URL
• Confirmed that that works by logging in to the admin panel
  • I tried editing a post. Without our plugins it defaults to the new-ish "block editor" (WYSIWG) and you have to find the hidden menu option to get back to raw HTML view. This seems OK-ish.

I did nothing on feeds. https://blog-6tqz3.ondigitalocean.app/feed is RSS (not Atom).

I think the next steps would be:

• Merge https://github.com/whatwg/blog.whatwg.org/pull/4
• Overwrite the current database dump on DigitalOcean with a fresh new database dump (from the current blog.whatwg.org)
• Merge this PR
• Switch the DigitalOcean DNS for blog.whatwg.org to the DigitalOcean App instead of the server

[domenic]

It works!