New blogs.kde.org

Sunday, 3 March 2024 | Carl Schwan

I'm happy to announce the launch of our revamped Blogs.KDE.org website, now powered by Hugo instead of Drupal 7!

This switch was motivated by the fact that Drupal 7 is now reaching end of life and since Blogs.kde.org is the home of many individual blog for KDE hackers so it was important to keep it up to date and secure.

Upgrading to Drupal 9 was ruled out because Drupal 8 significantly changed and the migration would have been very complex. By using Hugo, we also leverage the existing infrastructure which we use for most of other websites. The migration was fortunately simple and has been fully automated thanks to a small PHP script reading the database entries.

The repository for this new website is hosted on Invent and people who posted on blogs.kde.org in the last three years should have write access. If you don't have access and want to publish a blog post, please create a sysadmin request to get write access or just create a merge request and someone from the web team will be able to merge it.

With the new system, creating a blog entry, is as simple as writing a markdown file in content/posts/<username>/<year>-<month>-<day>-<identitfier>/index.md with some small extra metadata. For example:

---
# content/posts/carlschwan/2024-04-02-example-blog/index.md
title: My example blog post
authors:
  - carlschwan
date: 2024-04-02
---

Here goes the content

You can easily preview the content locally by running the following commands:

wget https://github.com/gohugoio/hugo/releases/download/v0.123.7/hugo_extended_0.123.7_Linux-64bit.tar.gz
mkdir hugo
tar xvzf hugo_extended_0.123.7_Linux-64bit.tar.gz -C hugo
./hugo/hugo serve --buildFuture --buildDrafts

And open http://localhost:1313 in your browser.

Happy blogging!