Split main website and blog into two projects

[winston-yallow]

The goal is to have two completely independent projects.

Split

Main Website

This should contain everything except the blog posts. The biggest issue here is the homepage that should still list the most recent blog posts. In the long run, these can be fetched from our CMS. In the meantime, I would just remove them from the homepage so that you can get started on the overall split.

Blog

The blog should only contain the articles and their pictures. In the end, this content will be moved to our CMS. At that point, the blog project will just host the overall structure, it won't host the articles themselves. We can get started on splitting the repo though already, and replace where the data is coming from once the CMS is set up.

Shared Snippets

One issue I see is the duplication of snippets for the navigation bar and so on. It would be nice to find a solution to share these reusable components across different projects. I currently don't have a preferred solution for this, but one option would be a shared git submodule. Another solution would be to have a snippets schema in our CMS, which hosts snippets that can be pulled by jekyll at build time via the API. I personally think it's better to have them in git though, because it's a bit weird if the website is open source except for some essential snippets.

[JohnVeness]

Hmm, what CMS are you considering? I kinda like the workflow of using GitHub for blog posts, and the way it makes it easy for people to contribute suggestions etc.

[adamscott]

Hmm, what CMS are you considering? I kinda like the workflow of using GitHub for blog posts, and the way it makes it easy for people to contribute suggestions etc.

We're currently planning to use https://squidex.io/. It's an headless CMS, so the content management is not directly tied to the actual rendering of the blog.

[winston-yallow]

@JohnVeness just to give some more context and thoughts on this:

First of all yes, the contribution workflow will definitely change, and using a CMS does have drawbacks. However we really want an easier way to manage blogposts, and we also want the repos to be smaller, faster to build, and easier to work with. Squidex allows us to do this, and also makes it nicer to work with localisations (ultimately we want to translate at least some blogposts), manage assets, and allows to schedule the publishing of articles.

That being said, we want to keep the Squidex instance somewhat open. Some of the features that may be interesting for contributors:

• Articles are made as a draft first. We can give this permission to basically anyone who wants to contribute an article.
• You can leave comments on (draft) articles to discuss them.

And a few more general notes why we want to use Squidex as the CMS:

• login via OIDC (so you can use your Godot SSO account to login)
• comment system to give feedback to authors
• self-hosted (Squidex is MIT licensed)
• built-in asset management
• good localization support

I hope this addresses some of your concerns, but feel free to give further feedback. We can at least try to make the transition as smooth as possible.

[JohnVeness]

Thanks. In Squidex, can we make suggestions by directly editing text, as you can here? I've been involved with proof-reading other blog sites and it was so tedious having to say "in paragraph 3, second sentence, there should be two 'o's in 'choose'" etc. It's much easier (both for people making suggestions and for the author of the article) to directly edit the text and submit as a suggestion that the author can one-click apply or reject.

[winston-yallow]

Not sure, I will look into that!

[winston-yallow]

@JohnVeness I've checked, and there is no way in Squidex to make suggestions by directly editing text, so that is a feature we will loose. I think we will still go forward with this as the other benefits outweigh this, but maybe we can make a feature request to Squidex to add this functionality in the future.

[JohnVeness]

OK. Thanks for checking. I'm afraid I will no longer be providing any proof-reading to blog articles in that case - I still have nightmares from trying to work with such a (non-)system previously!

[winston-yallow]

For reference, I've made a feature request: https://support.squidex.io/t/improve-content-reviews-with-a-way-to-add-suggestions-to-draft-items/6120