1274307 - Create a blog instance at blog.nightly.mozilla.org

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(Infrastructure & Operations :: IT-Managed Tools, task)

Description

[Pascal Chevrel:pascalc]

Hi,

I am working on making the Nightly channel for Firefox a real thing (see https://www.chevrel.org/carnet/?post/2016/05/19/Let-s-give-Firefox-Nightly-some-love) and I would like to have a blog at blog.mozilla.org/nightly to spread news about the project.

The admins and writers for this blog instance will be:
Pascal Chevrel <[e-mail]>
Marcia Knous <[e-mail]>
Jean-Yves Perrier <[e-mail]>

Ideally, I would love to have the blog set up before the London All Hands so as to communicate before and after the event on the project.

I would also like to know if we could have a push notifications wordpress plugin installed so as to all Nightly users to subscribe to our blog posts, is that possible?

A default mozilla theme is fine but if there are other branded options that would fit the "nocturnal" visual identity of Nightly (see https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/nightly/firstrun/ for example), that would be great. If there is no theming option for now or if it delays the blog creation, I can open a separate bug about it after the blog is set up of course.

Thanks!

Comment 1

[Pascal Chevrel:pascalc]

Mardi, since your were CCed automatically to the bug, I am supposing that this falls into your bucket or that you know who should be assigned. Could you help us getting that blog created? Thanks

Comment 2

[:Atoll]

Hi Pascal. Webops manages the technical side of our WP-Engine installation for blog.m.o these days. Someone pointed this bug out to us a couple hours ago on IRC. We don't normally watch this component (since the actual blog.m.o templates, content, and so on are managed by others), but regardless I apologize that no one from our team witnessed this bug sooner.

Shyam, what's the process to be followed for requesting and deploying new sub-sites at WP-Engine / blog.m.o? If that process involves Engagement, could you please reach out to them offline and make sure all the necessary information is present in this bug?

Comment 3

[Pascal Chevrel:pascalc]

Thanks Richard, I will wait for your and Shyam's update!

Comment 4

[Pascal Chevrel:pascalc]

Hi guys, any update?

Comment 5

[Craig Cook (:craigcook)]

Generally speaking we want fewer blogs, not more. If your content might be suited to an existing blog (https://blog.mozilla.org/futurereleases/ perhaps?) then it might be preferable to give you access to post there. But if creating a new blog is justified -- i.e. if it's unique content that doesn't really belong anywhere else -- setting it up is easy. 

We also usually seek approval from PR/comms, and I see that Mardi is already needinfo'd here so consider this a friendly ping: Mardi, do you approve this new blog?

Comment 6

[Pascal Chevrel:pascalc]

(In reply to Craig Cook (:craigcook) from comment #5)
> Generally speaking we want fewer blogs, not more. If your content might be
> suited to an existing blog (https://blog.mozilla.org/futurereleases/
> perhaps?) then it might be preferable to give you access to post there. But
> if creating a new blog is justified -- i.e. if it's unique content that
> doesn't really belong anywhere else -- setting it up is easy. 
> 

That's unique content, yes.

> We also usually seek approval from PR/comms, and I see that Mardi is already
> needinfo'd here so consider this a friendly ping: Mardi, do you approve this
> new blog?

If needed, you can ask my manager Doug Turner about it.

Comment 7

[Ryan Watson [:w0ts0n]]

It looks like Mardi no longer does the PR ack and Alexander Salkever does. Needinfo'ing him.

Comment 8

[Pascal Chevrel:pascalc]

Can I get an ETA please?

Comment 9

[Alex Salkever]

Let's chat, Pascal. I'm at [e-mail]. We are also rolling out new Medium guidelines (near final but WIP) which might be the fastest / easiest option. Alternatively, we could give you a tag on the blog.mozilla.org blog.  I just want to make sure we put it in the right place. 

ETA - 1 week or less.

Comment 10

[Doug Turner (:dougt)]

Alex, what is the next step here?  Who is the decision maker?

Comment 11

[Alex Salkever]

I am the decision maker. I am talking to Eric Pettit and Mary Ellen today to understand where this type of content would fit into which channel. More broadly, Craig Cook is right. We have releases (Testpilot, TestFlight, etc) scattered across multiple blogs / channels and its confusing. That's a larger information architecture issue that will require a bit more work to solve. So I want to give Pascal something far more immediate with the caveat that we may revisit in the future. Possibly a Medium blog on your nightly.mozilla.org domain?

Pascal - questions that would help us to understand what you need:

- How often do you plan to publish? Will this truly be nightly or weekly?
- Do you need to regularly publish visual elements like snippets?
- Who is the audience for this? Nightly users, obviously, but more detail - are they devs? Just early adopters? (If its devs, the Nightly content might fit in as a tag on Ali Spivak's upcoming Mozilla Tech Medium Channel)
- What would a sample post look like? Do you have one so we can quickly look at the content? Or briefly describe. 

In general, this thread is WAY too long for the type of decision we are making and I apologize for that. I'd love to have the capability to point you to something super quickly. Because this lives under FF, we need to make sure Eric Pettit is on board with whatever happens.

Comment 12

[Pascal Chevrel:pascalc]

(In reply to Alex Salkever from comment #11)
> I am the decision maker. I am talking to Eric Pettit and Mary Ellen today to
> understand where this type of content would fit into which channel. More
> broadly, Craig Cook is right. We have releases (Testpilot, TestFlight, etc)
> scattered across multiple blogs / channels and its confusing. That's a
> larger information architecture issue that will require a bit more work to
> solve. So I want to give Pascal something far more immediate with the caveat
> that we may revisit in the future. Possibly a Medium blog on your
> nightly.mozilla.org domain?
> 
> Pascal - questions that would help us to understand what you need:
> 
> - How often do you plan to publish? Will this truly be nightly or weekly?

The term nightly is unrelated to the frequency of publication, Nightly is our Firefox early adopters channel, before Aurora.
I would expect a weekly publication frequency on average, sometimes more, sometimes less, depending on the activity on the Nightly channel requiring communication (test of new platform features for example) and the availability of writers.


> - Do you need to regularly publish visual elements like snippets?

If you are talking about snippets on about:home, yes and I am already working with the snippets team on that. If this is not the snippets you are referring to then I would need more details about what you call snippets.

> - Who is the audience for this? Nightly users, obviously, but more detail -
> are they devs? Just early adopters? (If its devs, the Nightly content might
> fit in as a tag on Ali Spivak's upcoming Mozilla Tech Medium Channel)

Early adopters, developers (but marginally web developers), the core open source community supporting us, the technical QA community. People that have the profile to get involved in an open source project directly in the production process and not just as fans.

At first sight, Medium doesn't seem a good fit to me  as AFAIK:
- it doesn't live under a mozilla.org domain which is my main ask (I can open or maintain a blog myself on a non-mozilla domain name)
- it doesn't allow customization via plugind such as web push notifications or automatically posting links to new articles to Twitter and Facebook 
- it has limited syndication possibilities (planets, feed readers, aggregation on other sites...)
- it doesn't allow writing offline in markdown format which is likely what most editors would use
- the copyright of the content seems unclear to me, I want to have guest writers and I don't want them to refuse because they don't want to give the copyright of their articles to Medium
- I have doubts about Medium accessibility to people with disabilities and I also want to engage people to test the accessibility of Nightly

If your Medium strategy allows a corporate account that fix some of those problems or if my information is outdated (I haven't looked at Medium in like a year), it would of course become an option. There are definitely potential synergies with Ali, the Nightly channel by nature is the early production of all technical departments, but things like QA or contribution to the platform (think Servo, Gecko, Spidermonkey...) are probably out of the scope of her activities and Ali's main focus (webdevs) is not a primary interest of the people I want to attract to use Nightly.

> - What would a sample post look like? Do you have one so we can quickly look
> at the content? Or briefly describe. 

Examples of posts would range from short tutorials where user could learn to contribute to Firefox and the platform (simple tutorial to mozregression, explanation on how to report a good technical bug in Bugzilla, asking to test specific new technologies that just landed on Nightly...) to calls for participation to get involved in the promotion of the Nightly channel and the Mozilla platform through Nightly.

Examples of recent blog posts in the last 3 weeks that could have been published on an official Nightly blog if we had it:
https://blog.mozilla.org/nnethercote/2016/05/19/i-want-more-users-on-the-nightly-channel/
https://www.chevrel.org/carnet/?post/2016/06/06/Launching-Firefox-Nightly-with-a-temporary-profile-from-bash
http://mozillamarciaknous.wix.com/mozcommunity#!Nightly-is-where-I-will-live/c218b/571f755d0cf232b075ceb390

Here is an example of a past blog post that would be a good article to update and republish:
https://parkouss.wordpress.com/2016/01/11/mozregression-engineering-productivity-project-of-the-month/

Ideally, I'd love to have a weekly post talking about the most interesting patches that landed, but that would be for the future as it requires a lot of work and process to set up first, so probably 2017. 

> 
> In general, this thread is WAY too long for the type of decision we are
> making and I apologize for that. I'd love to have the capability to point
> you to something super quickly. Because this lives under FF, we need to make
> sure Eric Pettit is on board with whatever happens.

My concern is that I need to publish content real soon now while there is some buzz in the tech circles about my project and we have volunteers that want to get involved, but I don't want to make platform choices that are a fallback solution to unlock things but that would end up representing technical debt in the long term.

Comment 13

[Alex Salkever]

Hi, Pascal.

You are cleared for takeoff. Here's the deal.

- You can set up a WP blog on nightly.mozilla.org/blog. We do want it on the Nightly domain rather than dropped into the bigger mozilla blog pool. It should be an extension of Nightly.
- Please do this through David Tenser's team. We can use our existing WP accounts to host and admin the blog. 
- Please use the very same color scheme and and branding from the Nightly site. We want it to look very clearly like an extension of Nightly.
- Please do not host it yourself. We don't want to incur technical risk / debt / maintenance and clean up down the road. We can easily add it to our existing WP infrastructure. 
- Please do synch with Ali on the DevMarketing side. Because your posts will be in WP, you can very easily drop the ones that you wish to share into Medium (URL cut and paste for ingest via the Medium API)
- Obvious but needs to be said. Please use this blog only for Nightly-relevant information. 
- Comments management are going to be the responsibility of you / the Nightly team. 

In the near future, we will provide a limited number of templates and some color options that match our brand to allow for a limited but (we hope) acceptable selection to allow other Mozillians who wish to publish a blog a way to do so that is both on brand and different enough to be interesting. 

I hope this is sufficient for what you need. David - am happy to sync with you on this. If we can make this very quick, easy and clean then I'm sure everyone can be happy.

Any questions?

Thanks for your patience, Pascal!

Comment 14

[Craig Cook (:craigcook)]

(In reply to Alex Salkever from comment #13)

> - You can set up a WP blog on nightly.mozilla.org/blog. We do want it on the
> Nightly domain rather than dropped into the bigger mozilla blog pool. It
> should be an extension of Nightly.

I don't know if we can do this. So far we've only set up entire domains or subdomains to point to a WPEngine blog, I don't think we've done a subpath on an existing domain. I could be wrong. URLs would end up as something like "nightly.mozilla.org/blog/2016/08/post-title/" and I'm not sure how to negotiate that with the DNS for the parent domain and make sure other URLs at nightly.m.o/* still work. Or maybe it's easy, I really don't know. I defer to someone who knows more about this sort of thing.

> - Please use the very same color scheme and and branding from the Nightly
> site. We want it to look very clearly like an extension of Nightly.

It will take a bit of development work to customize the theme, but not a lot (it can be a child theme with some different CSS and graphics, not a full scratch-built theme). I'll have to fit it in with other priorities and commitments so I'm not sure I'll have time to work on it before July. Someone else may be able to pick it up before I can. The code lives at https://github.com/mozilla/One-Mozilla-blog and it would be a pretty basic child theme. We should file a separate bug to track the theme work.

Assuming the domain part is possible, we could get the blog set up and temporarily use the standard Mozilla theme until we can get the custom one built. We do have a dark color scheme already, which you can see at https://blog.mozilla.org/gameon/ (that header graphic can be customized easily without any code changes). It's not an exact match for the Nightly branding but it might be good enough to get us up and running quickly until we can apply a more tailored theme in a few weeks.

Comment 15

[Alex Salkever]

(In reply to Craig Cook (:craigcook) from comment #14)
> (In reply to Alex Salkever from comment #13)
> 
> > - You can set up a WP blog on nightly.mozilla.org/blog. We do want it on the
> > Nightly domain rather than dropped into the bigger mozilla blog pool. It
> > should be an extension of Nightly.
> 
> I don't know if we can do this. So far we've only set up entire domains or
> subdomains to point to a WPEngine blog, I don't think we've done a subpath
> on an existing domain. I could be wrong. URLs would end up as something like
> "nightly.mozilla.org/blog/2016/08/post-title/" and I'm not sure how to
> negotiate that with the DNS for the parent domain and make sure other URLs
> at nightly.m.o/* still work. Or maybe it's easy, I really don't know. I
> defer to someone who knows more about this sort of thing.

OK - please start that convo with David Tenser. We could possibly do some sort of redirect. But I really don't want it to be too complicated - just to be logical and not weird to users. 

> 
> > - Please use the very same color scheme and and branding from the Nightly
> > site. We want it to look very clearly like an extension of Nightly.
> 
> It will take a bit of development work to customize the theme, but not a lot
> (it can be a child theme with some different CSS and graphics, not a full
> scratch-built theme). I'll have to fit it in with other priorities and
> commitments so I'm not sure I'll have time to work on it before July.
> Someone else may be able to pick it up before I can. The code lives at
> https://github.com/mozilla/One-Mozilla-blog and it would be a pretty basic
> child theme. We should file a separate bug to track the theme work.


OK. Just keep it simple, please. :) My goal is to make this a really fast, painless process for you and for others. 

> 
> Assuming the domain part is possible, we could get the blog set up and
> temporarily use the standard Mozilla theme until we can get the custom one
> built. We do have a dark color scheme already, which you can see at
> https://blog.mozilla.org/gameon/ (that header graphic can be customized
> easily without any code changes). It's not an exact match for the Nightly
> branding but it might be good enough to get us up and running quickly until
> we can apply a more tailored theme in a few weeks.

Sounds good. As long as we are not creating too much chaos and we can get the other one tailored up.

Pascal - are you OK with this? If not, please let me know. Thanks!

Comment 16

[:Atoll]

Hi, Webops here. We host the Mozilla Wordpress blogs (which this would be hosting with).

WP-Engine cannot do subpaths of an existing domain, even with redirects. We assign entire domain names to WP-Engine only, and those domain names can only serve blog traffic and no other content. This isn't a valid choice for 'nightly.mozilla.org', even if we were to put redirects into place, so we'll need to select a URL for the blog that can be hosted.

Any of these URLs would be valid, were they approved:

https://blog.mozilla.org/nightly/

https://nightly-blog.mozilla.org/
https://nightly.blog.mozilla.org/

https://blog-nightly.mozilla.org/
https://blog.nightly.mozilla.org/

And, technically, we could also support hosting it at /blog/ under some domain name *other than* nightly.mozilla.org, though I can't come up with any examples of this that would actually look good, and so:

https://something-nightly.mozilla.org/blog/

So, as long as the *entire* domain name y'all eventually select for this Wordpress blog can be assigned to WP-Engine (or already is, e.g. blog.mozilla.org), then it's acceptable and we can proceed with the technical work once the process approval is complete.

Comment 17

[:Atoll]

(In reply to Richard Soderberg [:atoll] from comment #16)
> This isn't a valid choice for
> 'nightly.mozilla.org', even if we were to put redirects into place

To clarify: This isn't a valid choice because a pre-existing, non-blog website exists at https://nightly.mozilla.org/ already and must continue serving non-blog content. We cannot assign the domain 'nightly.mozilla.org' to WP-Engine as that would break all existing non-blog content. Since we must assign entire domains at a time to WP-Engine (standard requirement for all SaaS providers, e.g. mozilla.service-now.com and assets.mozilla.org), we must either use a different domain or wipe all existing content from the site.

Comment 18

[Alex Salkever]

(In reply to Richard Soderberg [:atoll] from comment #17)
> (In reply to Richard Soderberg [:atoll] from comment #16)
> > This isn't a valid choice for
> > 'nightly.mozilla.org', even if we were to put redirects into place
> 
> To clarify: This isn't a valid choice because a pre-existing, non-blog
> website exists at https://nightly.mozilla.org/ already and must continue
> serving non-blog content. We cannot assign the domain 'nightly.mozilla.org'
> to WP-Engine as that would break all existing non-blog content. Since we
> must assign entire domains at a time to WP-Engine (standard requirement for
> all SaaS providers, e.g. mozilla.service-now.com and assets.mozilla.org), we
> must either use a different domain or wipe all existing content from the
> site.

My preference then would be https://blog.nightly.mozilla.org/

Would that work for you Pascal?

Comment 19

[Pascal Chevrel:pascalc]

(In reply to Alex Salkever from comment #18)
> 
> My preference then would be https://blog.nightly.mozilla.org/
> 
> Would that work for you Pascal?

That would be absolutely fine, thanks!

Comment 20

[Pascal Chevrel:pascalc]

(In reply to Craig Cook (:craigcook) from comment #14)
> (In reply to Alex Salkever from comment #13)
> > - Please use the very same color scheme and and branding from the Nightly
> > site. We want it to look very clearly like an extension of Nightly.
> 
> It will take a bit of development work to customize the theme, but not a lot
> (it can be a child theme with some different CSS and graphics, not a full
> scratch-built theme). I'll have to fit it in with other priorities and
> commitments so I'm not sure I'll have time to work on it before July.
> Someone else may be able to pick it up before I can. The code lives at
> https://github.com/mozilla/One-Mozilla-blog and it would be a pretty basic
> child theme. We should file a separate bug to track the theme work.

Filed bug 1279160 and assigned it to you, we can talk about it at London as well.
> 
> Assuming the domain part is possible, we could get the blog set up and
> temporarily use the standard Mozilla theme until we can get the custom one
> built. We do have a dark color scheme already, which you can see at
> https://blog.mozilla.org/gameon/ (that header graphic can be customized
> easily without any code changes). It's not an exact match for the Nightly
> branding but it might be good enough to get us up and running quickly until
> we can apply a more tailored theme in a few weeks.


That sounds fine to me, thanks Craig!

Comment 21

[Pascal Chevrel:pascalc]

(In reply to Richard Soderberg [:atoll] from comment #16)

> https://blog.nightly.mozilla.org/
>[...] 
> 
> So, as long as the *entire* domain name y'all eventually select for this
> Wordpress blog can be assigned to WP-Engine (or already is, e.g.
> blog.mozilla.org), then it's acceptable and we can proceed with the
> technical work once the process approval is complete.

Now that we have agreee on https://blog.nightly.mozilla.org/ as the domain name, do you need specific bugs filed to track the technical work required to set it up?

Comment 22

[:Atoll]

As a first step, I filed bug 1279176 to get the DNS and SSL in place. Craig, should we defer the theme+setup side of things to you, or should we take further action to assist on the WP-Engine side of things?

Comment 23

[Craig Cook (:craigcook)]

(In reply to Richard Soderberg [:atoll] from comment #22)
> As a first step, I filed bug 1279176 to get the DNS and SSL in place. Craig,
> should we defer the theme+setup side of things to you, or should we take
> further action to assist on the WP-Engine side of things?

I'm happy to handle that part. I'll create the blog at blog.mozilla.org/nightly/ and we'll map the domain to that. Will update here when it's done.

(also clearing needinfo for djst since it looks like we've got everything we need)

Comment 24

[Alex Salkever]

Cool. Pascal and Craig - if you don't mind, please do a quick check in with me before you go live. I'd love to see it and learn from the process so we can unblock others as quickly as possible. Tnx!

Comment 25

[Craig Cook (:craigcook)]

> Cool. Pascal and Craig - if you don't mind, please do a quick check in with
> me before you go live. I'd love to see it and learn from the process so we
> can unblock others as quickly as possible. Tnx!

Technically it's "live" instantaneously once we create the blog within WordPress. It's up and running right now at https://blog.mozilla.org/nightly/. We can map the domain to that URL as soon as the DNS is updated. I've set Pascal, Marcia, and Jean-Yves as admins and applied the One Mozilla theme with the dark color scheme, and also added a Nightly header image just because why not.

While it's live right now it's also very obscure and unlikely to see any traffic until we start promoting it and search engines start crawling it. We could set it to private and it wouldn't be visible to anyone not logged into WordPress, but I'm not sure that's necessary.

Comment 26

[Alex Salkever]

Should have been more explicit. I wasn't sure if when you put it up you were going to PW protect it or keep it from public consumption (answer = no). I mainly just wanted to get a quick look before you started promoting it and even potentially weigh in on how we can properly connect / link it to other FF properties. Does that make sense?

Comment 27

[Shyam Mani [:fox2mike]]

Webops can go ahead (when everyone else is ready) and setup blog.nightly.mozilla.org (if it's still needed). Please let us know when that can be kicked off and we're happy to assist.

Comment 28

[Pascal Chevrel:pascalc]

(In reply to Shyam Mani [:fox2mike] from comment #27)
> Webops can go ahead (when everyone else is ready) and setup
> blog.nightly.mozilla.org (if it's still needed). Please let us know when
> that can be kicked off and we're happy to assist.

can I get this domain name set up please? Thanks

Comment 29

[Pascal Chevrel:pascalc]

ping

Comment 30

[Alex Salkever]

Webops, what is the blocker here? I'd really like to get Pascal set up with his blog. Let me know and I'm happy to try to help. Thanks!

Comment 31

[Pascal Chevrel:pascalc]

(In reply to Shyam Mani [:fox2mike] from comment #27)
> Webops can go ahead (when everyone else is ready) and setup
> blog.nightly.mozilla.org (if it's still needed). Please let us know when
> that can be kicked off and we're happy to assist.

Setting this bug as blocker because basically, this is blocking a lot or my work. Shyam, it's been several weeks now, what is blocking the creation of the sub-domain?

Comment 32

[Ryan Watson [:w0ts0n]]

I'll do this for you tomorrow.

Comment 33

[Shyam Mani [:fox2mike]]

Hey Pascal/Alex,

Apologies for the delay here. We were all in London when the go ahead came in and were focused on the work week. We also recently started 2 week sprints ourselves (the team is a little short handed now) and pick up work and plan ahead so we're not overwhelmed. When we planned for our last sprint - we hadn't heard back from you folks and therefore this bug didn't make it into the sprint. 

My apologies for that, and the delay, but we'll get this taken care of for you tomorrow. 

PS : Open positions for the team if you know any web operations folks! 

https://careers.mozilla.org/position/oohm3fwO
https://careers.mozilla.org/position/o2Dm3fwO
https://careers.mozilla.org/position/o0lc3fwk

Comment 34

[Pascal Chevrel:pascalc]

Thanks guys! I do know Web Ops in France but not in the US (the positions all indicate US regions)

Comment 35

[Sylvestre Ledru [:Sylvestre]]

> PS : Open positions for the team if you know any web operations folks! 
Just like Pascal... Not super inclusive in term of location ;)

Comment 36

[Ryan Watson [:w0ts0n]]

I ran into a few bugs during the SSL part. But other than that, we should be good!
https://blog.nightly.mozilla.org/