replacing Whonix wordpress blog - https://www.whonix.org/blog

Patrick · June 19, 2018, 10:05pm

Originally published at: https://www.whonix.org/blog/replacing-whonix-wordpress-blog

Blog posts are currently automatically mirrored to forum posts.

I don’t like wordpress.

After the years I still haven’t figured out their editor which is different from any other editor (mediawiki, discourse, phabricator).
Requires constant upgrades which may or not may break the installation.
Updater somewhat broken / annoying.
The design doesn’t look that great.
No time to become a wordpress architect.

Is it worth / advisable keeping https://www.whonix.org/blog or would it be better / possible to just have a new NEWS forum section where only moderators post?

0brand · June 19, 2018, 11:03pm

If you can accomplish the desired result by creating a News forum it would free up valuable developer time. IIRC iry also spend time trying the figure how to use wordpress, syntax etc etc… This could have been spent developing.

iry · June 20, 2018, 9:02am

Whonix blog features:

RSS
Fortunately, the forum supports it, too. For example, posts in website section: http://forums.dds6qkxpwdeubwucdiaord2xgbbeyds25rbsgr73tbfpqpt4a6vjwsyd.onion/c/website.rss
comments
Using forum makes it more clear for user on how to make comments (they will very likely know they need a forum account). Using the quoting feature of the website will also make the comments more to-the-topic.
Tags/Categories
I am not sure if Whonix forum can support tag system.
Syntax
Much better when using forum as you have pointed out.
Sorted by posting time order
Can we strictly sort the posts by the first time we posted instead of the last time we comment on it? It seems to be an important feature.

Patrick · June 21, 2018, 2:50am

discourse isn’t trying to replace wordpress. Even https://blog.discourse.org is based on wordpress.

Whonix disocurse upgraded just now. Luckily, discourse core now comes with tags support so no plugin installation required. Tags enabled in discourse settings. Haven’t figured out how to use it yet though. #news

Very good point.

discourse category settings has Topic List Sort By: Created. Hope that’s what we are looking for.

Patrick · June 21, 2018, 2:59am

Works as expected.

https://forums.whonix.org/c/news

iry · June 21, 2018, 5:36am

That’s perfect!! I didn’t expect there is such a great solution!

According to https://blog.discourse.org/2018/05/discourse-2-0-released/ , there’s a feature called shared drafts which seems to be extremely helpful to blog drafts preparation:

Shared Drafts

Staff can designate a category for shared drafts, and pre-compose topics that only other staff can see for review prior to posting. After posting, all logged edits are removed so the history is clean, and the timestamp is reset, too.

But I didn’t see this option on our forum. Since it has just been upgraded, does that mean we need to enable it somehow?

iry · June 21, 2018, 5:43am

TODO for us:

enable shared draft feature if possible
move all the previous blog posts to the new section if necessary
do another announcement post on whonix.org/blog, telling people (why) it’s been moved to forum.whonix.org/c/news
write an introduction as pinned topic for news section, including the RSS
redirect all request from whonix.org/blog to forum.whonix.org/c/news
change the links to blog on Whonix website
change the link to blog in whonix-welcome-page

iry · June 21, 2018, 6:52am

Done:

Patrick · June 21, 2018, 6:53am

https://forums.whonix.org/admin/site_settings/category/all_results?filter=shared

shared drafts category

Enable the Shared Drafts feature by designating a category for topic drafts.

Now set to Staff.

iry · June 21, 2018, 7:02am

Done:

iry · June 21, 2018, 7:11am

I just tried it, but it still doesn’t work.

Maybe the short demo video here under shared draft section will help you with the testing? https://blog.discourse.org/2018/05/discourse-2-0-released/

Patrick · June 21, 2018, 7:37am

Shared draft created. https://forums.whonix.org/t/shared-draft-test/5358

Patrick · June 22, 2018, 4:15am

iry:

move all the previous blog posts to the new section if necessary

This is a ton of work but necessary to keep project history. Anyone up
for it?

0brand · June 22, 2018, 10:04am

I’ll get it done little by little. Do I need any special permissions to move blog posts?

Patrick · June 22, 2018, 10:42am

0brand:

Patrick:

Anyone up
for it?

I’ll get it done little by little. Do I need any special permissions to move blog posts?

Wow!

Moderator only.

Each blog post should be having a companion post in Whonix forums
already that needs to be moved to the news forum.

Maybe the companion topic has yet to be created. (We moved to discourse
and wordpress to discourse plugin long after we started using
wordpress.) In that case, I’d need to promote (not sure we already did)
your wordpress account so it would be created.

That’s it. Sorting by date is automatic.

torjunkie · June 23, 2018, 12:20am

@iry

Good job. But multiple clearnet links have been introduced with this change when using the v3 onion.

(i.e. at least from http://forums.dds6qkxpwdeubwucdiaord2xgbbeyds25rbsgr73tbfpqpt4a6vjwsyd.onion/)

Please fix:

Sub-forum links that now point to clearnet link instead of the v3 onion
Separate threads in sub-forums that now point to clearnet address instead of the v3 onion (ironically the 2nd, 3rd etc pages point to the .onion)

iry · June 23, 2018, 10:57am

Hi @torjunkie !

I didn’t find any links described above. Could you please provide me with an example?

Thank you !

iry · June 23, 2018, 10:58am

Thank you so much for your effort, @0brand !

iry · June 23, 2018, 11:32am

I have moved all the blog posts published after this post to news section:
http://dds6qkxpwdeubwucdiaord2xgbbeyds25rbsgr73tbfpqpt4a6vjwsyd.onion/blog/livestream-in-1h

But I forgot to add tags until half way through the work.

0brand · June 24, 2018, 2:07am

Great job iry! I started at the bottom of the list and worked my way up. I’ve completed from “Whonix Wiki updates” up to “Whonix Development News”. The development section is halfway complete.

Don’t feel bad about the tags. I started using them at the beginning but I tagged the threads with generalized tags instead of the correct ones. So I had to go back and correct all my mistakes at the end.