Changing home page "What's new" item shouldn't require a code rollout or cherry pick

[Matthew Revell]

Changing or adding a news item in Launchpad's home page "What's new" section currently requires a code roll out or a cherry pick.

This means that a developer and senior team member (to give permission) must be involved in what is otherwise a simple communications task.

My suggested solution is:

1. I create a new category on the Launchpad News blog - e.g. "Home page".
2. The "What's new" section draws its items from the headlines in that blog category.
3. We link the headlines to the full blog post.
4. We add a "Read the Launchpad News blog" link at the bottom of the "What's new" list.

[Joey Stanford (joey)]

I agree we need a better way to do this and it would behoove us to keep the front page in sync with our other communication mediums such as the news blog and help.lp.net.

My first thought for this is to add RSS functionality that draws from a special category on the blog (that would enable us to post something only to the LP front page, or the LP front page and the visible blog page. This also would allow us to notify the Planet with no real effort should we want this) but also gracefully handles the case where the blog is offline for some reason.

Keeping our informational areas (blog, LP front page, wiki) in sync and sourced from as few places as possible will make the management of that type of communications activity much easier.

[James Henstridge (jamesh)]

Writing a Launchpad view that processes an XML or text file to generate a list of news items for the front page should not be particularly difficult. That file could be periodically downloaded by either Launchpad itself or a cron job. The news file should be cached to disk to protect against temporary problems with the service. Having the download done by a cron job would mean that no single webapp request is responsible for updating the news file.

I notice that all the existing news items point at help.launchpad.net. If we use an RSS feed from the news blog, would that mean that all news items needed to be posts on the blog? If so, is that considered a problem?

[Joey Stanford (joey)]

> I notice that all the existing news items point at help.launchpad.net. If we use an RSS feed from the news blog, would that mean that all news items
> needed to be posts on the blog? If so, is that considered a problem?

Matt to confirm but I don't think it is a problem. We can always make a hidden category which feeds this.

This seems more difficult than simply updating a text file in bzr and pushing it out at release time but we'd like to have the Launchpad Front Page news have the ability to change mid-cycle. We could also use this feature as a service announcement (e.g. "Launchpad will be down Sunday the 9th from 3am UTC to 7am UTC for Database Maintenance. " A method like the above would also help keep us in sync.

I agree the material should be stored inside Launchpad so in the event the blog goes down, we have a backup .

[Matthew Revell (matthew.revell)]

> I notice that all the existing news items point at help.launchpad.net. If we use an
> RSS feed from the news blog, would that mean that all news items needed to be
> posts on the blog? If so, is that considered a problem?

I see that as a benefit, rather than a problem. I used the help wiki as a compromise before the blog was fully operational and also, admittedly, the "What's new" text has been pretty last minute and so it took less time to point to existing documentation about the feature, than to write a good blog post about each.

> This seems more difficult than simply updating a text file in bzr and pushing it
> out at release time but we'd like to have the Launchpad Front Page news have
> the ability to change mid-cycle

I'm in two minds about this. Right now, we use "What's new" to say what's new in the latest release. If we want to continue to use "What's new" in that way, then a regularly updated feed may not be appropriate.

However, if we want "What's new" to be regularly updated throughout the cycle - we could even rename the section "Launchpad news" - then the RSS feed makes sense to me, because it prevents duplication of effort.

[James Henstridge (jamesh)]

There are certainly cases where we've had newsworthy things that were not connected to a release. For instance, important projects migrating to use Launchpad services (e.g. Ubuntu, Zope 3, etc). So I agree that having the flexibility to add these items without a code change is worth it.

[Matthew Revell (matthew.revell)]

Post-3.0 "What's new" has become "Recent Launchpad blog posts". This is still updated manually. Instead, it should take a feed of the most recent five posts on the blog, in a certain category, using the headline and perhaps the first ten or so works from that post as a teaser.

Here's the feed:

http://blog.launchpad.net/category/front-page/feed

[Henning Eggers (henninge)]

Jono mentioned: "... all without increasing the load time of the front page."

I see two solutions to this:

1. Use Ajax to load the RSS feed on the page. The question is what to use as a fallback if the feed does not load for some reason so that that space on the homepage does not stay empty. Some general text about Launchpad? The "Recent blog posts section" which we'd have to continue updating at each roll-out?

2. Use a cronscript to poll the RSS feed and put the posts somewhere (In a file? in the database?) so that the homepage can take them from there. This has the advantage that, should the feed fail, we still have the latest blog posts to display. This needs another cronscript and possibly a database patch.

Any other ideas?

[Stuart Bishop (stub)]

On Fri, Oct 30, 2009 at 2:56 PM, Henning Eggers
<email address hidden> wrote:
> Jono mentioned: "... all without increasing the load time of the front
> page."
>
> I see two solutions to this:
>
> 1. Use Ajax to load the RSS feed on the page. The question is what to
> use as a fallback if the feed does not load for some reason so that that
> space on the homepage does not stay empty. Some general text about
> Launchpad? The "Recent blog posts section" which we'd have to continue
> updating at each roll-out?
>
> 2. Use a cronscript to poll the RSS feed and put the posts somewhere (In
> a file? in the database?) so that the homepage can take them from there.
> This has the advantage that, should the feed fail, we still have the
> latest blog posts to display. This needs another cronscript and possibly
> a database patch.
>
> Any other ideas?

Given we host the feed, why can we not rely on it any more than, say,
we rely on squid and the Librarian for serving icons or Apache for
serving +icing?

If the RSS feed is deemed unreliable, a simple cronjob could stash it
where we can use Apache to serve a copy.

--
Stuart Bishop <email address hidden>
http://www.stuartbishop.net/

[Launchpad QA Bot (lpqabot)]

Fixed in stable r11192 <http://bazaar.launchpad.net/~launchpad-pqm/launchpad/stable/revision/11192>.

[Launchpad QA Bot (lpqabot)]

Fixed in stable r11217 <http://bazaar.launchpad.net/~launchpad-pqm/launchpad/stable/revision/11217>.