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

[Patrick]

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]

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]

would it be better / possible to just have a new NEWS forum section where only moderators post?

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]

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

Tags/Categories

I am not sure if Whonix forum can support tag system.

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

• https://blog.discourse.org/2018/05/discourse-2-0-released/
• https://blog.discourse.org/2017/10/its-time-we-talked-about-tags/

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.

Very good point.

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

[Patrick]

Works as expected.

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

[iry]

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]

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]

change the links to blog on Whonix website

Done:

whonix.org/blog -> forum.whonix.org/c/news

[Patrick]

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]

change the link to blog in whonix-welcome-page

Done:

whonix.org/blog -> forum.whonix.org/c/news

[iry]

Now set to Staff .

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]

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

[Patrick]

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]

Anyone up
for it?

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

[Patrick]

0brand:

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]

@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]

Hi @torjunkie !

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)

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

Thank you !

[iry]

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

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

[iry]

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

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]

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.