GitLab Digital Experience, 7 Jan 2021

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From YouTube: Sprint 003 (CMS Supersprint), Digital Experience

Description

Link to epic
https://gitlab.com/groups/gitlab-com/marketing/inbound-marketing/-/epics/192

1st Netlify CMS Content Type - News category blog post
https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/www-gitlab-com/-/merge_requests/71034

2nd Netlify CMS Content Type - Topic page
https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/www-gitlab-com/-/merge_requests/69508

A

Hello, I'm lauren barker, I'm here with tina and we're with the digital experience team and we're going to go over what we have released for the cms and tina's gonna go. Take it away.

B

I'm gonna get this started. I'm gonna share my screen um for a second, because um here we go. Can you see this gif.

A

B

Right so um so I wanted to distract everyone with this um gift that uh lauren shared with me. It's become our sprint mascot we're calling the sprint our super sprint because, as the name suggests, we've accomplished big things. um So a quick review of our goals. We wanted to get a working mvp version of the cms editor onto the topics pages.

B

um We wanted to implement some foundational layout updates and start applying the design system um to the components for the topic pages, and we also got a head start or wanted to get a head start on their second content release, which is the blog.

B

I'm gonna stop my share and I'm gonna pass it over to lauren to about some engineering stuff.

A

I love that snail. That's how I feel whenever I ship code, I'm like so good, um so released um two content types, um the first content type that is now editable. The cms are topic pages and I will go ahead and share my screen.

A

um And we'll go here so this just launched- and this page can now be edited by the cms locally and we've applied a new template to it and we're going to keep iterating on this template to make it um awesome and the second content type that we've added to the cms is the blog which we can now go over here. I've fired this site up um on my local host, here's the cms and we can see in our sidebar. We have two content types. First is the topic page. Second, our news, blog post.

A

You click on this. We can see all of our blog posts that are in the news category and I'll click on one down here from december 12 looks like loading loading.

A

And this gives you a nice interface where you can enter your content for the blog post and edit it, um and this image is actually pretty cool. You can scroll through all of the existing images that are in a specific directory and make edits that content.

A

Our first content type that we introduced are these topic pages and right now, there's only one topic page that is using this new template infrastructure and that's our continuous integration and continuous delivery page and here is where you'll be able to enter all the content. For this page, like your title, your seo description, what's going to display in the header body. So if we go over here, we can see up here. This is where all this content now lives, something I wanted to point out, which is pretty cool.

A

This suggested content piece is, we can add. Unlimited number, and all you have to do is place the url of the blog article that you want to display at the bottom of the topics page and it will automatically pull in that correct blog, the blog image, title description and link.

A

That is super cool. um So that's the code, that's been released and is now live I'll, pass it off to tina for our ux and wires.

B

I'm just gonna share my screen again.

B

Are you seeing the um gitlab right now yeah my notes? Okay, great okay, so um we've been also getting a head start on doing some um internal user discovery for the blog. um As we mentioned in our planning session, we've chosen, the blog as our next candidate for the cms integration and, while that's being set up, we're taking the opportunity to also update the layout template.

B

um So for the sprint we created and distributed a survey to some members of the blog team to collect some qualitative data and we generated a report that will inform ux and some engineering decisions as we move through the different phases of integration.

B

Another thing that was accomplished is that we workshop the existing blog layout with our internal digital experience team to gain further insights on ux best practices and engineering best practices as well, and we also made some headway on the blog wireframes. These are still under review, but they are available for anyone. That's interested in taking a peek just check out our cms slack channel, or you can dm me directly for the link and for those who do decide to have a look you'll see on the side here.

B

This is um generally where we note our design rationale for some decisions, we're making and lists relevant issues and conversations that are happening for each one of the updates that we are proposing awesome yeah. So what's next on our agenda uh technology, infrastructure changes, lauren.

A

Yeah yep, so with this sprint we made some decisions about uh infrastructure for our topic pages. The content is going to live as yaml in data files and those are going to get built through a proxy and our blog content is going to continue to live as markdown files using the existing infrastructure.

A

So there's still going to be markdown files, and we have filed an issue with our infrastructure team for creating our oauth application and once that is set up, uh we'll be able to turn the cms on and you'll actually be able to access it through about.gitlab.

A

Yay, uh how does this help us move towards our q for okr these first two content types um they're, the first two to be edited by uh netlify cms and it's gonna allow us to start iterating on the user experience of authoring content locally in preparation of releasing this to the the live url. So now that this is here, we can start iterating on how that's going to look in the admin making sure everything's labeled correctly.

A

The order is right, tina's going to get in there and fire up her local dev server and it's gonna be really exciting.

B

um From a ux standpoint, um because editorial content is an integral part of inbound, an inbound marketing strategy, giving content creators tools to work efficiently um and also reducing technical friction helps keep them stay focused on their content goals um and also, obviously, updating layouts to meet current ux and design best practices.

B

Further positions get lab as trusted industry leaders, um as well as educators, which will hopefully attract and engage users, um and so that the content team can continue to build meaningful relationships with them and that's how we are moving closer to our q4 okrs.

B

A

B

Yeah release date is um next on our agenda and it's live yeah and yeah. That's it. We don't usually really know how to end these meetings so see you later later,.