Archive vs Recent blogs and meetups

[abjerner]

For both meetups and blog posts, we're currently only pulling in recent items, and always just saving the recent items - so we don't really have an archive of these items.

Perhaps we should have some kind of archive? For blog posts (which would benefit most from this), this would mean that RSS items are imported (either in a database or a JSON files on the disk), and we can retrieve them again later. Having an archive also means that we can enable users to search through older blog posts.

Having an archive also means that we can create filters for some of the major blogs - eg. from the Umbraco HQ, Skrift.io and 24 Days In Umbraco (as shown on the mockup below).

If we do this, there are probably a number of falls pits that we need to consider/look into as well:

• Say I have a blog, and I for some reason want to remove one of my articles from Our. How do I do this?

  • As ~/config/CommunityBlogs.json keeps track of the individual blogs (and which Our members they belong to), the owner of a blog could be given a special page to "administer" their blog (eg. hide/delete) certain blog posts. This could also be a way to tell Our that an article is now obsolete.

• How can we add old blog posts? Most RSS feeds only contain the most recent blog posts (eg. no more than 30).

  • We could say that we only wish to add old blog posts from some of the major blogs - eg. Umbraco HQ, Skrift and 24days.in/umbraco.
    
    For instance the latter has an RSS feed for each year: https://24days.in/umbraco-cms/2012/rss/
    
    Sebastiaan can probably find something similar for the HQ blog.

• This issue is just for getting the discussion started, so there are most likely also something I haven't thought of.

[nul800sebastiaan]

1. Navigation: should be fine for now to just list all blogs/meetup groups in the menu I think, we can rework it once the list gets too long
2. Removal: I think removal would be super rare, don't need to be concerned about that for now
3. Old posts: Not sure, let's start with what data we have now and can get in the future, if people want to include more archives they could update their RSS generator or have a separate one for a while to offer archived posts - if we start with what we have now we'll still have a 2 year archive in 2 years

[abjerner]

I've been playing a bit around with this one. The IDs of the various blogs don't use the same format. They're all GUIDs, but some are lowercase, some are uppercase and a few are enclosed in curly brackets:

https://github.com/umbraco/OurUmbraco/blob/master/OurUmbraco.Site/config/CommunityBlogs.json

I think it would be best to use the same format - it looks better, and may also have some advantages when we're storing and comparing GUID-like strings in the database.

So should we fix this in the JSON file, or correct this with code?

Something like:

private BlogInfo(JObject obj) {

    Id = obj.GetString("id");
    Title = obj.GetString("title");
    Url = obj.GetString("url");
    RssUrl = obj.GetString("rss");
    LogoUrl = obj.GetString("logo");
    MemberId = obj.GetInt32("memberId");
    CheckTitles = obj.GetBoolean("checkTitles");
    Encoding = Encoding.UTF8;

    // Attempt to correct the format of the ID (becomes a lowercase GUID)
    Guid guid;
    if (!Guid.TryParse(Id, out guid)) throw new Exception("Invalid GUID for blog " + Title);
    Id = guid.ToString();

}

Or even change the Id property to Guid instead of string:

private BlogInfo(JObject obj) {
    Id = obj.GetString("id", Guid.Parse);
    Title = obj.GetString("title");
    Url = obj.GetString("url");
    RssUrl = obj.GetString("rss");
    LogoUrl = obj.GetString("logo");
    MemberId = obj.GetInt32("memberId");
    CheckTitles = obj.GetBoolean("checkTitles");
    Encoding = Encoding.UTF8;
}

If we then later convert the ID back to a string, it will have a format as 12f4440a-c87b-4450-964a-d4ea50fae18c - that is: lowercase and not enclosed.

[umbrabot]

Hiya @abjerner,

Just wanted to let you know that we noticed that this issue got a bit stale and might not be relevant any more.

We will close this issue for now but we're happy to open it up again if you think it's still relevant (for example: it's a feature request that's not yet implemented, or it's a bug that's not yet been fixed).

To open it this issue up again, you can write @umbrabot still relevant in a new comment as the first line. It would be super helpful for us if on the next line you could let us know why you think it's still relevant.

For example:

@umbrabot still relevant
This bug can still be reproduced in version 8.9.0

This will reopen the issue in the next few hours.

Thanks, from your friendly Umbraco GitHub bot 🤖 🙂