For the last few releases I have struggled with the convoluted infrastructure
(which, of course, I have created - so this is all my fault) for publishing
announcements. WordPress had to be hidden from the world (as we had way too
many hacking attempts and the amount of time spent on keeping this secure and
alive was ridiculous), the static export is nice but takes many manual steps
and is pretty error prone. And the integration with transifex for translations
was just painful for everyone involved (especially me).
Based on this. I am once again going to try something different. Something
that's completely integrated with GitHub and should in theory make it easy for
people to translate announcements and maybe even take over some of the
maintenance work from me. Because that's one of the oddities here; several
people over the years have offered to help -- but my setup just wasn't done in
a way where it felt easy to give others access...
As a result, we now have a GitHub.com/subsurface/subsurface.github.io/
<http://subsurface.github.io/> repo which then gets published as
https://subsurface.github.io/ <https://subsurface.github.io/> via GitHub pages.
If this works out, this can apparently be reasonably easily integrated with our
custom domain.
The goal right now is NOT to reproduce our website there. Instead I was hoping
to just move our announcements to that URL and allow people to translate the
through a simple pull request. If this turns out to be amazing and everyone
loves it, then we can think about migrating (most of) the full website, but for
now I wanted to focus on the announcements.
Posts are written in markdown - just like our README. And typically styling for
announcements is so primitive that the syntax really shouldn't matter all that
much. I have re-created the Subsurface 4.9.3 announcement and created a
Subsurface-mobile 3.0 announcement (which had never been published anywhere)
and have also added a draft for Subsurface 4.9.4. So far I have only populated
a bare basics German translation (that needs a lot more work), and haven't
populated any of the other translations, yet. But I think that the structure is
pretty straight forward and should make it easy for others to step in and
complete my work.
- there's a shared footer for desktop release announcements (aptly named
_includes/desktop-release-bottom.MD) that tells people how to download
binaries. I have this in three languages and it should be obvious how to add
others. The use of variables like {{page.version}} should be quite easy to
understand.
- posts are in subdirectories, currently we have en/ and de/, filenames are
iso-date plus topic, translations are connected via a 'ref' tag in the front
matter (for simplicity I tried to keep this very structured, e.g.
subsurface-4.9.3).
- some terms have central translations (this includes the language short codes,
names, and flags) in _config.yml, but in general most of the translation work
likely consists of copying the English post into the right directory, keeping
the ref in the front matter and translating the actual announcement text
Maybe I'm underestimating the learning curve, but I'd love to hear what people
think - and ideally some of you would try to add our most common translations
(Dutch, Spanish, Portuguese - for those I have created languages, if you want
to add a different one, you'll need to add another language block in
_config.yml).
Thanks
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