What’s This All About?

It’s long been an ambition of many within the marketing team to establish a site along the lines of Red Hat Magazine, but one that’s dedicated to content related to and created by the Fedora community. We’ve been working with various members of the infrastructure team, aiming to get a solution hosted on Fedora’s own servers, but as a result of their humanity and our inability to arrange any serious testing, we’ve never made it past test installations of various incarnations of WordPress. No more! We’ve set up this WordPress.com blog so that anybody who’s interested in helping can develop a good work flow and start creating content that is of a consistently high quality.

This doesn’t mean that we’ll never move to using Fedora’s own infrastructure, just that now we have somewhere to start that particular concern no longer needs to limit us: the move to Fedora’s infrastructure can happen when it happens.

What Can We Expect?

Over the past few months there have been lots of different ideas thrown around about what kind of content we might want to post to a Fedora Magazine, and we’ll probably see a lot of experimentation with different formulas over the next few months too, but the picture I post here is how we’re going to start.

Our primary content will be structured around the days of the week, with each one having a theme:

• Mondays: Fedora Weekly News – your chance to catch up on Fedora’s mailing lists and blogs from all across the community.
• Tuesdays: Developer Interview – find out what exciting features Fedora developers are working on for the next release.
• Wednesdays: Hints & Tips – discover lots of little ways to get more out of your system, tackling common annoyances as well as cool how-tos.
• Thursdays: Fedora Weekly Webcomic – take an alternative look at Fedora goings-on with Nicu’s webcomic.
• Fridays: Contributor Guides – want to start contributing to Fedora but don’t know how; look here.

Hopefully this content will form the core of what we want to do. Much of it is already being regularly produced from a number of community sources, helping us to get off to a running start! It may be that not all of it will be in place from the very beginning, but hopefully over the next few weeks things will develop nicely.

Around this core there will be extra posts from time to time, covering all sorts from release announcements, to editorial content and also tutorial series. We hope that readers will enjoy what we produce, and hopefully become contributors themselves at some point.

How Do I Become A Contributor?

We will make more details available about how to get involved with this project over the coming days, as we figure out for ourselves how we want to add new contributors and decide what to post outside of the core content described above. If you’d like to help hash out these details, join us on the fedora-marketing-list where these discussions are happening.

The most likely outcome is that it will be a combination of email submissions for one-time contributions, and being added as a blog member for those who wish to be a more permanent part of the project. The latter will probably take advantage of WordPress’s roles feature, with a combination of editor and contributor roles used for the majority of users based upon interests, reputation and open spaces.

What Next?

Look out for Fedora Weekly News being posted here tomorrow, as well as in its usual locations, with the rest of the core content to follow over the week.