Adding a new blog post

Blog posts use the Article content type in this particular implementation. When someone tells you that a blog post needs to be added to the website, here's what you need to do. As of time of writing, you essentially refers to Alex. If Sarah's and Hui Jing's backups change, this page will be updated.

You will usually get a Google Doc containing the content. Sometimes, people will try to embed images into the Google Doc which is a terrible idea because you cannot download the image. You must proceed to harass the person making the request to give you the actual image files. As a responsible developer who cares about performance, please run the image through your image optimiser of choice. I always use https://tinypng.com/, but you do you.

You must also make sure that the person requesting the blog post provides you with a feature image. You will most likely receive this as a 6mb monster of an image file. Please ask our designer, Madalina, to help you resize the image to 800x600 if it is a photograph, or if it is an illustration, ask her to give you the SVG file in 1100x600. She also needs to give you a thumbnail image that is 350x350.

Finally, the next thing that is missing will be the summary, which is what shows up on the blog listing. You can wing it and just copy whatever is in the body of the blog post to put in there. Or alternatively, harass the person making you do this shit.

1. Login to the Drupal backend. We are not disclosing the URL here because we have been hit by bot spam on the login.

2. Click on "Content" in the toolbar.

   

3. Click on "Add content".

   

4. Click on "Article"

   

5. The title of the article is just the title of the blog post.

6. For Pillar, if it is something to do with grants or grantees or ambassadors, it will be Mission (orange). If it is a press release or something related to the future, it will be Vision (purple). If it is related to technology in some way, then Teal. We haven't got any Values (pink) blog posts yet. When in doubt, harass the requester. They should have known better than to make you guess.

7. For gradient style, ask Madalina to tell you what to pick.

8. Upload the images Madalina gave you. Again, make sure you have already run them through https://tinypng.com/ or your preferred image optimiser.

9. Unless explicitly asked for, leave the byline blank, nobody cares.

10. Fill in the summary, in whichever form you derived the words for it.

11. For the actual content of the blog, you are strongly encouraged to paste without formatting, then adding any links in after the fact. Add in the images if necessary and make sure they have properly written alt text. Again, if you can't come up with something good, you can harass the requester, although they might not give you good alt text either. Please refer to Writing great alt text: Emotion matters for guidance.

12. The rest of the fields are for Sarah or Hui Jing to worry about when back from vacation.

13. Hit "Save" and go to /blog to check if the new blog post looks right.

14. If all looks good, invalidate the Cloudfront cache on AWS. This page assumes you know how to do this. If you're not a developer, please ping Sarah, Hui Jing or Jason Brewer to help you out. Otherwise, you can just wait it out and the blog listing should update itself in a day?