Fedora Magazine Planning

The Fedora marketing team is working on launching a Fedora-focused online magazine for the Fedora users and developers.

The idea first came when some folks on the team had The Fedora marketing team is working on launching a Fedora-focused online magazine for the Fedora users and developers.

The idea first came when some folks on the team had FWN (Fedora Weekly News) and its future. They determined that it might be a cool thing to revive FWN and the Fedora Insight project(which was meant to be a Drupal-based online Fedora community) with a new site that features, as Ruth explained:

• Short, informative content like you might think of FWN for
• Longer form stories, interviews, and articles
• The technical content that Fedora used to create to some extent for Red Hat Magazine (which is in high demand but no longer exists)
• Cultivated content from Planet
• The content that Insight was already meant for, like Board meeting minutes or announcements

(You can read more about the thinking on the Fedora marketing list thread that kicked off the discussion.)

The next decision was where / how to host it. Some options that were thrown out:

• Fedora Infrastructure – too hard to maintain.
• WordPress.com hosting – annual hosting fee around $100 ($13 for only domain mapping)
• Dreamhost – annual fee around $100, Debian-based… a little weird to host a Fedora site on a non-Fedora related system.
• OpenShift – open source system, Red Hat based, but only 1 GB storage

Yes, you guessed right! We hosted it in openshift. We also wanted to make it very easy to maintain(although this proved very tricky, you can read more here), so that’s why we picked OpenShift in the first place. WordPress makes it very easy to maintain and control the magazine, so we choose to go with wordpress.

Initial Prototyping

Mizmo was the one who built the wordpress instance in OpenShift. It prove to be very easy, as it is only 4 clicks away – yeah, that’s right! That’s why my blog now is hosted there. Although there are some tricks with openshift that were quite easy to understand in the process:

• You need to provide a public key in your Openshift account, so you can get GIT, SSH and FTP access to your apps. If you are a windows user, you can set up your pair of public/private keys with puttugen, or if you are a linux user, you can install the RHC client tools and create your pair from there. With rhc tools you can fully manage your apps, create, delete them and take backups of your apps.
• Openshift provides you 3 gears and 1 GB of storage for a free account. So if you need more storage or resources(like us), you have to upgrade you account and go buy the Silver plan

Themes & Design

The design folks and mizmo came up with plenty ideas for the new magazine logo, as well for the overall Magazine design. You can see the discussion in this link

After a lot of discussion, design decided to go with Arras AR2 wordpress theme, with some modifications. A few months later it prove to be a very buggy theme, as it was in beta phase, and no new updates were coming out. Maiki then had to create a child theme for the theme we were using, as it was not easy to change the theme, as design had worked hard on this. Maiki’s child theme, fixed a lot of bugs, as the magazine was showing wrong search results on post names, tags and categories (and many tiny bugs that I can’t recall right now)

Come and help us!

We are looking for passionate contributors like you to contribute to the Magazine.

• If you are interested in joining you can see this link, and follow it step-by-step, send an introduction to the mailing list, and ask for an account in the Magazine. We will make you an account with author privileges
• The marketing team meetings are weekly on Thursdays (3 PM US ET), and Fedora Magazine is a topic that comes up during those meetings, so it’s another good way to meet the folks working on this project and to get involved. Most of the time in the meetings we talk about the magazine.