Open discussions on specific topics selected by the Software Working Group and selected from the list of SWG Topics For Discussion.
Round Table Discussion: "Best practices for managing text content in large web applications" moderated by Nathan Tolbert
Recording:
Slides:
Attendees: Nathan Tolbert, Lisa Gatzke, Yong Wook Kim, Rebecca Eveland, Nick Kowalik, Chris Navarro, Fangyu, Zhou, Max Burnette, Santiago Nunez-Corrales, Ya-Lan Yang, Kastan Day, Camille Goudeseune, Matt Berry, Bingji Guo, Michael Shapiro, Minu Mathews, Sara Lambert, Leigh Fu, Jim Phillips, Chen Wang, Sandeep Puthanveetil Satheesan, Marcos Frenkel, Visu Monaharajan, Jong Lee, Pengyin Shan, Luigi Marini, Lisa Yanello
Discussion:
Many large web applications include significant amounts of text content, which is prepared and maintained by writers, not the development team. What are the best strategies in today's landscape for dealing with this text?
Many writers don't want to deal with git or markup languages. Developers don't want to have to convert things. How have teams solved this problem and what has or hasn't worked well?
Discussion of trust - Jupyter Notebooks those writing documents may not be in sync with the technical specs. All docs should be checked before they are published for accuracy
Chen mentioned HubZero
Kastan - I agree with Max, a huge priority for me is that authors have (1) full ownership from draft to publication and (2) some control over layout & styling so it can be beautiful.
My preference is wordpress GUI on a subdomain of your site, like blog.mysite.com. I love this style for docs/blog. I need to figure out how to clone this visual design: https://docs.railway.app/
Kastan also notes @Max, for my wordpress strategy there’s zero Github (which is a pro or con). It’s 100% Wordpress-hosted GUI. It’s super easy to use, formatting looks great, no-code.
Sara notes - KnowEnG did use Hubzero (although I’m not clear how it was being used), but CHEESE uses WorkbenchKnowEnG used Wordpress as their main CMS
KnowEnG background on Hubzero:
https://knoweng.org/research/cyberinfrastructure/hubzero-an-integrative-platform-for-scalable-access-to-knoweng/Max notes that changing txt files, you can use GitHub, but there is a steep learning curve or are familiar with markdown. Drupal is also a tool for customizing the look of sites.
Discussion of how many writers are needed on any given project. Confluence was chosen as it seems to be easy to use with text and cross referencing.
Kastan asks What about internationalization? Does anyone translate to multiple languages? Sandeep notes that there is a place on campus that translates international documents. there is a fee for this.
Kastan notes uiuc.chat detects your location and injects the proper language at runtime using “CDN-based Edge Middleware” in next.js
Comments
Links mentioned in this Round Table:
Best Practices Handbook: https://github.com/ncsa/software-development-handbook
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