FWN on Fedora Insight: roll up meeting

[Pascal Calarco]

News Team (and Mel) --

I attended the marketing team meeting today, and we discussed Fedora 
Insight, and FWN on FI[1].  I have some updates, and a request, for you.

The Docs team is currently working on getting a WYSIWYG editor packaged 
with Zikula for Fedora Insight, and this should be in place within the 
next few dates, if all goes well.

Both Dale and I have been experimenting with FWN on Fedora Insight over 
the last few weeks, and have identified a couple needs to help make 
workflow as easy as possible for adding, editing and approving content 
on Fedora Insight:

1) Need for an HTML-aware WYSIWYG editor within Fedora Insight; wiki 
markup won't work on Fedora Insight, and so we need to add references in 
news articles as HTML <a href="..."></a>  for example.  Dale has
also 
noted[2] that it would be really useful to be able to easily reference 
mediawiki objects like User, Package, etc.  We'll have to see how we can 
tailor the WYSIWYG editor with shortcuts to these, if at all.

2) Need to create subcategories under FWN; I have gone in and created 
news categories for each beat corresponding to the active beats we 
currently have.

3) Extended timeout value for Zikula so beat writers aren't logged off 
while they are entering news items;

Now, Fedora Insight is going to launch on October 14th, which is a 
Wednesday, and we hope to have the first FWN issue available on Fedora 
Insight the following Monday, on October 19.  To be ready for this, we 
need to have all beat writers take some time to get into the test Zikula 
site and familiarize ourselves with it.

Please read over the Fedora Insight pages[3] and then establish a FAS 
account on the test system[4] and ask to be added to the CMS_admin group 
in the test FAS instance[5]

Okay, next, I'd like to have a Fedora News IRC meeting, sometime next 
week or the first part of the following week, prior to October 14th.  
I've set a Doodle poll up so we can register when we would be available 
to meet on IRC.  When you have a chance, please look at your schedule 
and respond:

http://www.doodle.com/hxcyxir4uuubc73k

Okay, that's enough to get us started.  Questions or comments?  Thanks all!

  - pascal

[1] 
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-marketing-list/2009-September/msg00...
[2] 
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-marketing-list/2009-September/msg00...
[3] http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Fedora_Insight
[4] http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Fedora_Insight#Check_it_out.21
[5] https://publictest3.fedoraproject.org/accounts

[Adam Williamson]

On Tue, 2009-09-29 at 22:10 -0400, Pascal Calarco wrote:

>  1) Need for an HTML-aware WYSIWYG editor within Fedora Insight; wiki
>
>  markup won't work on Fedora Insight, and so we need to add references in 
>  news articles as HTML <a href="..."></a>  for example.  Dale has
> also 
>  noted[2] that it would be really useful to be able to easily reference 
>  mediawiki objects like User, Package, etc.  We'll have to see how we can 
>  tailor the WYSIWYG editor with shortcuts to these, if at all. 
How is this going to work for the plain text version of the newsletter?
If you write a text using in-line hyperlinks it's generally very hard to
automatically generate a usable plain text version in all cases.

-- 
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
IRC: adamw | Fedora Talk: adamwill AT fedoraproject DOT org
http://www.happyassassin.net

[Paul W. Frields]

On Wed, Sep 30, 2009 at 08:24:47AM -0700, Adam Williamson wrote:
>  On Tue, 2009-09-29 at 22:10 -0400, Pascal Calarco wrote:
>  
>  > 1) Need for an HTML-aware WYSIWYG editor within Fedora Insight; wiki 
>  > markup won't work on Fedora Insight, and so we need to add references in 
>  > news articles as HTML <a href="..."></a>  for example.  Dale
> has also 
>  > noted[2] that it would be really useful to be able to easily reference 
>  > mediawiki objects like User, Package, etc.  We'll have to see how we can 
>  > tailor the WYSIWYG editor with shortcuts to these, if at all.
>  
>  How is this going to work for the plain text version of the newsletter?
>  If you write a text using in-line hyperlinks it's generally very hard to
>  automatically generate a usable plain text version in all cases. 
Couldn't you just process that with links or w3m?

-- 
Paul W. Frields                                http://paul.frields.org/
  gpg fingerprint: 3DA6 A0AC 6D58 FEC4 0233  5906 ACDB C937 BD11 3717
  http://redhat.com/   -  -  -  -   http://pfrields.fedorapeople.org/
  irc.freenode.net: stickster @ #fedora-docs, #fedora-devel, #fredlug

[Adam Williamson]

On Wed, 2009-09-30 at 11:26 -0400, Paul W. Frields wrote:
>  On Wed, Sep 30, 2009 at 08:24:47AM -0700, Adam Williamson wrote:
>  > On Tue, 2009-09-29 at 22:10 -0400, Pascal Calarco wrote:
>  > 
>  > > 1) Need for an HTML-aware WYSIWYG editor within Fedora Insight; wiki 
>  > > markup won't work on Fedora Insight, and so we need to add references in 
>  > > news articles as HTML <a href="..."></a>  for example. 
> Dale has also 
>  > > noted[2] that it would be really useful to be able to easily reference 
>  > > mediawiki objects like User, Package, etc.  We'll have to see how we can 
>  > > tailor the WYSIWYG editor with shortcuts to these, if at all.
>  > 
>  > How is this going to work for the plain text version of the newsletter?
>  > If you write a text using in-line hyperlinks it's generally very hard to
>  > automatically generate a usable plain text version in all cases.
>  
>  Couldn't you just process that with links or w3m? 
The problem's in the style. At present, as we know the links will be
presented as references after the main text body in both the HTML and
text-only versions, we write the text to reflect this. The style you
would use when writing text with an in-line link is, in some cases,
different.

-- 
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
IRC: adamw | Fedora Talk: adamwill AT fedoraproject DOT org
http://www.happyassassin.net

[Pascal Calarco]

On 30/09/09 11:57 AM, Adam Williamson wrote:
>  On Wed, 2009-09-30 at 11:26 -0400, Paul W. Frields wrote:
> > On Wed, Sep 30, 2009 at 08:24:47AM -0700, Adam Williamson wrote:
> >> On Tue, 2009-09-29 at 22:10 -0400, Pascal Calarco wrote:
> >>
> >>> 1) Need for an HTML-aware WYSIWYG editor within Fedora Insight; wiki
> >>> markup won't work on Fedora Insight, and so we need to add references in
> >>> news articles as HTML<a href="..."></a>   for example. 
> Dale has also
> >>> noted[2] that it would be really useful to be able to easily reference
> >>> mediawiki objects like User, Package, etc.  We'll have to see how we can
> >>> tailor the WYSIWYG editor with shortcuts to these, if at all.
> >>
> >> How is this going to work for the plain text version of the newsletter?
> >> If you write a text using in-line hyperlinks it's generally very hard to
> >> automatically generate a usable plain text version in all cases.
> >
> > Couldn't you just process that with links or w3m?
>
>  The problem's in the style. At present, as we know the links will be
>  presented as references after the main text body in both the HTML and
>  text-only versions, we write the text to reflect this. The style you
>  would use when writing text with an in-line link is, in some cases,
>  different. 
Could we perhaps take the RSS output and post-process this to derive a 
text version using XSLT?

   - pascal

[Adam Williamson]

On Wed, 2009-09-30 at 15:35 -0400, Pascal Calarco wrote:

>  > The problem's in the style. At present, as we know the links
> will be
>  > presented as references after the main text body in both the HTML and
>  > text-only versions, we write the text to reflect this. The style you
>  > would use when writing text with an in-line link is, in some cases,
>  > different.
>  
>  Could we perhaps take the RSS output and post-process this to derive a 
>  text version using XSLT? 
again, the issue's not the technical question of how do you turn it into
a text document, there are ways to do that.

I may actually have been misunderstanding a bit here. is the issue just
to convert the 'References' block in an FWN formatted just as it now
into HTML links for publication within Insight? if that's the thing, I
don't have any problems.

-- 
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
IRC: adamw | Fedora Talk: adamwill AT fedoraproject DOT org
http://www.happyassassin.net

[Pascal Calarco]

On 30/09/09 03:52 PM, Adam Williamson wrote:
>  On Wed, 2009-09-30 at 15:35 -0400, Pascal Calarco wrote:
>
> >> The problem's in the style. At present, as we know the links will be
> >> presented as references after the main text body in both the HTML and
> >> text-only versions, we write the text to reflect this. The style you
> >> would use when writing text with an in-line link is, in some cases,
> >> different.
> >
> > Could we perhaps take the RSS output and post-process this to derive a
> > text version using XSLT?
>
>  again, the issue's not the technical question of how do you turn it into
>  a text document, there are ways to do that.
>
>  I may actually have been misunderstanding a bit here. is the issue just
>  to convert the 'References' block in an FWN formatted just as it now
>  into HTML links for publication within Insight? if that's the thing, I
>  don't have any problems. 
Beat writers are going to write up their beats differently in Fedora 
Insight than they do now on the wiki.  This will take a bit of getting 
used to as any change does, but once the editor is in place, it should 
be roughly equivalent in the amount of work, if I have to guesstimate 
from this vantage point.

The larger question, I suppose is whether we should try to maintain FWN 
on the wiki as well as FWN within Fedora Insight, at least during the 
Oct.14- FUDCon Toronto (Dec 7-9).  I think if FI is successful, we can 
completely migrate from the wiki to zikula as the delivery mechanism, 
which means we can free ourselves of wiki markup and think of these 
purely as HTML-enhanced text.

   - pascal

[Adam Williamson]

On Wed, 2009-09-30 at 16:16 -0400, Pascal Calarco wrote:
>  Beat writers are going to write up their beats differently in Fedora
>
>  Insight than they do now on the wiki.  This will take a bit of
>  getting 
>  used to as any change does, but once the editor is in place, it
>  should 
>  be roughly equivalent in the amount of work, if I have to guesstimate 
>  from this vantage point.  
OK, then my potential problem still stands, if we're still intending to
produce a plain-text version.

Consider this little snippet that might be in an FWN:

----
Interested readers can visit the page<ref>http://www.somepage.com</ref>
for more information.

<references/>
----

That works fine in both the HTML and plain text versions. You wind up
with:

----
Interested readers can visit the page[1] for more information.

[1] - http://www.somepage.com
----

Now, imagine we're writing in HTML with no MediaWiki stuff available,
using the suggested method of just going with <a href> tags. The obvious
way to write that same line is like this:

----
Interested readers can visit <a href="http://www.somepage.com">the
page</a> for more information.
----

That in-line reference renders fine to HTML, obviously. But how do you
programmatically turn it into readable plain text? In this particular
example's case, you could probably automatically extract the link and
shove it underneath the text and it'd be OK, because the text's so short
and any link associated with it can really only be read one way. But if
you have a longer paragraph with several in-line <a href=> links like
that, how do you reliably render a plain-text version of that same text,
with the links intact, which will make it clear to the reader which bit
of text each link should be associated with?

-- 
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
IRC: adamw | Fedora Talk: adamwill AT fedoraproject DOT org
http://www.happyassassin.net