Reduce friction for blog posts

[oliviergoulet5]

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.

There is friction in the process of adding blog posts to the site.

The current procedure is:

1. Create the page
2. Submit the page to Newsroom
3. Await content moderation

Describe the solution you'd like

The procedure could benefit from some automated processes.

The page already exists on the site before the page is submitted to newsroom. The blog posts
can simply be grabbed locally and "merged" with the other news items. This would eliminate the need to wait for content moderation.

By merged, I mean we can compare news items and blog posts. If a blog post is not found in the newsroom, then get it locally from /blog/.

This solution would fetch the blog posts similar to how eclipse.org/research fetches projects. We would use Hugo json.json templates. It would also require a new shortcode than hugo-solstice-theme's newsroom.

Describe alternatives you've considered

• We could separate blogs from newsroom if we don't want to deviate from hugo-solstice-theme's newsroom shortcode. It would mean not needing to maintain a custom implementation.

• We could also just keep the process as-is.

/cc @rickoco @chrisguindon

[rickoco]

This would be great. Thank you @oliviergoulet5

[chrisguindon]

Another solution would be to create a new section on the homepage to display blog posts that would be separate from news.

[rickoco]

@chrisguindon @oliviergoulet5 - we don't really want yet another drop down menu. We don't have enough blog content to warrant a separate page and we don't distinguish this content from news items. All that to say, we'd like a single page with news / blog items

sorry I missed this previously - I was down with covid all of December

[chrisguindon]

Thanks @rickoco for the update.

@oliviergoulet5 Let's try to solve this with my suggestion.

[oliviergoulet5]

I have an early preview right here: https://preview-559--openhwgroup-org.eclipsecontent.org/ with your suggestion @chrisguindon. This adds a blog list under events on the homepage.

However, I don't think separating news and blog is what @rickoco wants.

we don't distinguish this content from news items

Correct me if I'm wrong @rickoco.

[chrisguindon]

@oliviergoulet5 I understand but this is also the simplest solution for implementation and future maintenance.

If this is not exactly what we want, we can still consider using that work as a phase 1 solution while we work on implementing the functionality that would enable us to merge blog posts from the site with newsroom items which will require a bit more development time.

I think the solution here would be to add a param to the newsroom shortcode that would allow us to specify XMLs that we can use to include additional items:

https://preview-559--openhwgroup-org.eclipsecontent.org/resources/blog/index.xml

This XML is currently empty since we are creating a new section for each post:
https://github.com/openhwgroup/openhwgroup.org/tree/main/content/resources/blog/openhw-industrial-grade-verification-for-open-source-core-v-ip-cores

A post should not be a new sub-section. The _index.md files for each post also need to be renamed to index.md.

@rickoco How do you wish we proceed?

Do you want us to finalize the work that @oliviergoulet5 already started or do you prefer to wait for a better solution, which will require more time but will enable us to include our blog posts with the news section without creating a separate section on the page?

[rickoco]

hey @chrisguindon and @oliviergoulet5 - thanks for looking into this. For the reader / site user, a single locations for news / blog posts is what is best. As I mentioned earlier we don't distinguish between "news" and "blogs". We only need one category, not two and certainly not two different locations on the site.

[chrisguindon]

@rickoco I see you prefer to wait for longer but have the exact functionality instead of deploying this into 2 phases. We can do that.

[rickoco]

@rickoco I see you prefer to wait for longer but have the exact functionality instead of deploying this into 2 phases. We can do that.

Thx @chrisguindon and for now we manually add the blogs to news as we've been doing...