1339233 - Create new blog on Wordpress for Firefox

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(Websites Graveyard :: blog.mozilla.org, defect)

Description

[Eric Renaud [:erenaud]]

The actual request to create the new blog for Firefox - https://blog.mozilla.org/firefox

Blog will use the template currently being updated with new brand. If it's easier to wait for that work to be done to then create the Fx blog with it, let's do so.

Target set (live) is next week (week of Feb 20th, acknowledging the US holiday on Monday)

Comment 1

[Eric Renaud [:erenaud]]

Fabio - please provide Craig with the list of authors that will need perms to post to this blog, indicating if they're already set up in Wordpress or if they'll need accounts created. 

The requirement is their LDAP email address, both to set up an account for them as well as to confirm they have an existing account, please.

Comment 2

[Fabio Rios [:frios]]

Craig, initial authors are:

[e-mail] (no existing wordpress)
[e-mail] (yes, has existing wordpress)

Comment 3

[Justin Crawford [:hoosteeno] [:jcrawford]]

(uplifting email decision)

* Let's put the blog at https://blog.mozilla.org/firefox
* A typical post might look like https://blog.mozilla.org/firefox/firefox-is-the-fastest-browser

Questions:

1. Can we redirect this URL to the new blog? https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/category/firefox/
2. Can we populate the blog with posts from that category, to start?
3. Can we put a simple block of content at the top with "brochure" information about Firefox, like the one on OpenDesign? https://blog.mozilla.org/opendesign/

Comment 4

[Chris More [:cmore]]

just to confirm with :hoosteeno and Fabio that they don't want the dates like /2017/03/01/ in the blog post URL and that the posts should just be "firefox-is-the-fastest-browser"

There are pros an cons of the dates:

* pro: if the content is mostly relative to a timely event or point in time
* con: if content is still relevant and the date is old, consumers may think it is dated.

If we can keep the content about a topic and not a period of time, not having the date in the blog post URL would be good.

Justin/Fabio: can you confirm?

Comment 5

[Chris More [:cmore]]

(In reply to Fabio Rios [:frios] from comment #2)
> Craig, initial authors are:
> 
> [e-mail] (no existing wordpress)
> [e-mail] (yes, has existing wordpress)

Can we please add [e-mail] and [e-mail] too? I've seen multiple times with blog posts that some author get some URL wrong, they are not available, and people are scrambling to make a quick edit. The URLs in these posts are important since it will impact SEO.

Comment 6

[Justin Crawford [:hoosteeno] [:jcrawford]]

Dates in URLs aren't adding a lot of SEO value unless the sequence and timeliness of posts is a constant important factor in discovery or understanding, as in daily news or journals. 

We will always have product announcements and those have dates. Dates will still be in content -- but as elements of the URL they're not doing a lot of good work for us.

We have precedent for this. Here's a big announcement that happened on a date, but we're not using the date in the URL: https://blog.mozilla.org/opendesign/arrival/

Comment 7

[Chris More [:cmore]]

Ok, so Justin, is your recommendation to not have dates in the URL structure? I would vote for that too given the nature of this blog.

Comment 8

[Eric Renaud [:erenaud]]

Craig, please do the needful here:

- Create the new blog - blog.mozilla.org/firefox
- Keep the blog hidden (author access only) 
- Add, creating accounts as necessary, authors to the blog as follows:
    - [e-mail] (new)
    - [e-mail] (new - I want to be able to assist in a given 'scramble' situation)
    - [e-mail] (existing)
    - [e-mail] (status unknown)
    - [e-mail] (status unknown)
- Set initial featured blog section to be populated by category/firefox/
- Configure, if required, blog URLs to be created manually w/o dates in them

- Pending delivery of copy, add a simple block of content at the top, below the banner, a la OpenDesign blog
- Pending delivery of banner image (Friday), add banner image

Please have this up before EOD, Friday the 17th (so the morning of the 21st is fine).

Comment 9

[Craig Cook (:craigcook)]

I've created the new blog and the above users can log in at https://blog.mozilla.org/firefox/wp-admin/ using LDAP credentials. You all have Administrator privileges so great power, great responsibility, etc. 

Right now the site is only visible to logged in users and we can make it public when we're ready.

I've activated the Frontierline theme but of course aspects of its design will be changing very soon. There currently isn't a way to add an intro blurb but I'll build that in along with all the other theme updates. 

We'll need a decent title and a tagline, which you can change in Settings > General. The tagline is optional and just make it blank for no tagline.

Permalinks don't include the date, only the post slug, which is automatically a hyphenated form of the post title but you can also craft slugs by hand when you post. Note that without a date post slugs must be unique to render unique URLs, otherwise you'll get slugs like "hello-world" and "hello-world-2." Usually not an issue, but something to be mindful of if you repeat post titles.

I haven't added any content yet. While it's certainly possible to import the entire Firefox category from the main blog, I'm not sure that's a great idea. There are 254 posts in the Firefox category going back to 2008. If we migrate all that content to this new blog we should probably delete it from the old blog to avoid the duplication, but that means breaking a lot of links or creating 254 individual redirects.

Of course, it would also be nice to have a non-empty blog. Maybe we could just copy over a handful of recent Firefox posts instead of the entire category? Maybe the past few months worth, or even the entire past year. That would give you a non-empty blog to start from but would let most of the older historical content stay where it is.

Let me know how you wish to proceed but I recommend against the full category import.

Comment 10

[Fabio Rios [:frios]]

Just logged in. This is great. We'll begin dressing it up.

Thanks Craig!

Comment 11

[Fabio Rios [:frios]]

Craig, can you also give Christa Seabolt <[e-mail]> access to the blog

Comment 12

[Craig Cook (:craigcook)]

(In reply to Fabio Rios [:frios] from comment #11)
> Craig, can you also give Christa Seabolt <[e-mail]> access to
> the blog

Done!

Comment 13

[Fabio Rios [:frios]]

Craig, Rachel Wong just joined our team, can we get her access to WP blog?

[e-mail]

Comment 14

[Craig Cook (:craigcook)]

I added Rachel a while ago, just clearing needinfo.

Comment 15

[Fabio Rios [:frios]]

Craig, can we list the author as  "Firefox" regardless of who posts?

Comment 16

[Craig Cook (:craigcook)]

(In reply to Fabio Rios [:frios] from comment #15)
> Craig, can we list the author as  "Firefox" regardless of who posts?

We could make a pseudo-user named "Firefox" like our Mozilla pseudo-user. Or perhaps you can use the Mozilla pseudo-user instead of a new Firefox one? 

However, if you really *never* want to show a different author on any post, ever, the best option is to just not display the author name at all, which we can also do. I can make that update soon if that's agreeable, but I won't be able to work on it until the end of next week at the earliest. If you want to get the site live ASAP then I recommend assigning posts to the Mozilla user for now and we'll remove author names in the very near future.

Comment 17

[Fabio Rios [:frios]]

(In reply to Craig Cook (:craigcook) from comment #16)
> (In reply to Fabio Rios [:frios] from comment #15)
> > Craig, can we list the author as  "Firefox" regardless of who posts?
> 
> We could make a pseudo-user named "Firefox" like our Mozilla pseudo-user. Or
> perhaps you can use the Mozilla pseudo-user instead of a new Firefox one? 
> 
> However, if you really *never* want to show a different author on any post,
> ever, the best option is to just not display the author name at all, which
> we can also do. I can make that update soon if that's agreeable, but I won't
> be able to work on it until the end of next week at the earliest. If you
> want to get the site live ASAP then I recommend assigning posts to the
> Mozilla user for now and we'll remove author names in the very near future.

Mozilla sounds good. How does one do that?

Comment 18

[Craig Cook (:craigcook)]

(In reply to Fabio Rios [:frios] from comment #17)

> Mozilla sounds good. How does one do that?

You'll find a dropdown of authors on the post edit page, and I've just added the Mozilla pseudo-user. If you don't see the author dropdown check the "screen options" tab at the top right.

See "setting the author of a post" in this guide: https://docs.google.com/document/d/16-3cFhOHOd7YuxQShF-bEN51-f4bIcFs64tTCT6VlYA/

Comment 19

[Fabio Rios [:frios]]

Hey Craig, can you help us add another user to our blog?

[e-mail]

Thank you!

Comment 20

[Fabio Rios [:frios]]

Craig, sorry, one more: [e-mail]

Any chance I can have admin rights do this for you?

Comment 21

[Craig Cook (:craigcook)]

(In reply to Fabio Rios [:frios] from comment #20)
> Craig, sorry, one more: [e-mail]

Added.

> Any chance I can have admin rights do this for you?

You are already an admin but adding users is a little funky with our LDAP setup. You need to use the "Add User" link in the sidebar, NOT the "Add New" button at the top of the users page. There are also issues with adding first-time user (like a new hire) where the LDAP lookup regularly fails and we have to employ a workaround. So next time you want to add a user to the blog you can attempt it first and just ping me if you have any trouble.

Also, since the blog is live now I'm going to resolve this bug, which I should have done a few weeks ago :)

Comment 22

[Fabio Rios [:frios]]

Thanks, Craig