Create a blog page with all articles from dev.to

[fraxken]

I really love what @tony-go has done for his personal website and blog module.

I think we could achieve something similar with the following steps:

• Storing all articles as markdown (require one of the TSC member who have access to do it).
• Having some sort of build step to convert it to HTML (idealy directly from CI but we can achieve that later if too complicated at first).
• Add a new blog page with all articles.
• Hightlight them in the home page.
• Probably something else I forgot (do not hesitate to comment).

[PierreDemailly]

How do we handle/show the author ?

If we want a cool UI, we cannot put it in the MD directly, right ?

[fraxken]

I think we can use YAML Front Matter for that (like vitepress).

So each markdown will begin with something close to:

---
title: foobar
author: John Doe
date: XXX
---

Often markdown > HTML lib support it (for example showdown have a getMetadata() method).

[fraxken]

Added some articles in root folder ./articles (with metadata). We will see later if we also added the banner :)

[nasfernane]

Do you need the full article content ? I never used myself but there is supposed to be a dev.to API we can fetch from. I don't think it's possible to retrieve content but if all you want is a block with title, author etc with a link to the actual article, it may be possible to fetch it dynamicaly without storing all markdown files

[nasfernane]

I'm gonna give it a try

[fraxken]

@nasfernane There is already examples exported in ./articles (I can easily edit and fetch/transform content of all past articles so that's not a subject).

[nasfernane]

Can we add descriptions aswell to the metadatas ?

[nasfernane]

I made a first draft, using additional header button to highlight and navigate blog and articles

At first I converted manualy md to html, the result is "ok" but not as good as when I use marked lib. If you guys want to avoid using a third lib I can try to update my initial script to get a better result.

I have several questions/notes:

• To retrieve authors pictures I used the gouvernance core contributors lists. If author name is in core members list I map the picture to his github account. It would require the authors name to be exactly the same as in the core list. Good or bad idea ?
• I intend to add a sanitize library for the output HTML, but considering you're the one providing the templates, do you think it's overkill ?
• I have an issue regarding dev.to links like when you link another article. On dev.to interface it's an embedded element that retrieve data but in the markdown file its a dev.to tag eg. {% link https://dev.to/fraxken/announcing-new-node-secure-back-end-1dp9 %} - not really user friendly. I think we either need to format in initial article or I try to manualy transform but it would probably not be optimal
• I can add read time estimation based on words number - if you feel like it
• I added some lorem ispum at the "description" spot we could add - would be easier to read and choose articles in my opinion

Let me know what you think - I'm gonna wait for your feedbacks before continuing

[fraxken]

You can use a third-party lib for transforming MD to HTML

1. I guess we only need the github username
2. No special opinions rn (I guess the mode secure we can be then the best)
3. Yes they are a bit problematic (we can probably refactor them).
4. Feel free to experiment
5. Yep that's good