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I noticed that the github repo is apparently abandoned and the blog is back to WordPress.

I'd be interested to know what were the decisions that led to switching back. Was the content creation process hindered by Markdown + git? Were there growing pains that couldn't be solved?

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  • In a nutshell: "[WordPress] is actually pretty alright for non-technical contributors."
    – user315433
    Aug 29, 2017 at 2:25
  • in addition, I don't think SE runs its own blog instance in house any more - they killed off all the site blogs, and the main company blog(s) are run on another provider
    – Journeyman Geek Mod
    Aug 29, 2017 at 4:26
  • @JourneymanGeek wrong. stackoverflow.blog is operated 100% by Stack Exchange. The only third party provider used there is for comments. (Disqus)
    – Shadow Wizard Chasing Stars
    Aug 29, 2017 at 9:04
  • @JourneymanGeek if you mean usage of WordPress then you're right, but since they don't have the top bar or any login info in the blog it's easy to maintain. I think the site blogs used to have some fake top bar and login info, which made maintaining them a nightmare.
    – Shadow Wizard Chasing Stars
    Aug 29, 2017 at 9:09
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    @ShaWizDowArd Journeyman Geek is correct - our company blog is hosted externally now. The issue with our internal Wordpress setup was never that we put a static topbar in the templates. It was more along the lines of keeping up with security patches and maintaining the rest of the infrastructure.
    – Adam Lear StaffMod
    Aug 29, 2017 at 16:29
  • @Adam thanks! Guess one never stop learning. :-)
    – Shadow Wizard Chasing Stars
    Aug 29, 2017 at 19:12
  • @JourneymanGeek Last night I spent an hour reading Stack Overflow blog that should be deleted because it's first in search list and project has been nuked: stackoverflow.blog/2015/07/02/how-we-built-our-blog My google search was "Convert Stackoverflow answers to Jekyll or Hugo Blog posts". It's annoying broken solutions (Wordpress is better) shows up in google search top of the list.
    – WinEunuuchs2Unix
    Oct 21, 2021 at 1:48
  • I can't really help there. I'm not, nor have I ever been an employee of stack exchange, not for lack of trying.
    – Journeyman Geek Mod
    Oct 21, 2021 at 6:51

1 Answer 1

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Yes, it is. We made the decision to move over (...again) to WordPress last year. This is hosted externally.

As you guessed, I asked that we move this over because the content creation process wasn't just hindered, it was broken.

Non-technical authors couldn't contribute without a developer assisting and pushing it live. This became an impossible situation as we started to scale up our content and diversity of authors.

Making Jekyll function the way we wanted would have required significant development work, and maintaining it or building out new functions would have drained resources from other products we need to focus on at Stack Overflow.

Moving this into WordPress and hosting it elsewhere not only made the content team's life much easier, it freed up our engineers from having to reply to every "Hey, I have a blog post..." request.

We're all a lot happier for it.

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    I'm happy this makes everyone happier. Maybe you should edit the readme.md to reflect that as well. And consider some acknowledgement of the users that provided PR's but were never merged/closed. Yes, I'm in that list ...
    – rene
    Aug 29, 2017 at 17:19
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    @rene Good idea. Updating now.
    – kcpike
    Aug 29, 2017 at 17:27
  • Actually this makes sense. SE developers should focus on the core products of SE. Things like image hosting and blog hosting should be totally external. Too bad it took so much years for the blogs to get there. :-)
    – Shadow Wizard Chasing Stars
    Aug 30, 2017 at 7:00
  • best decision you made :)
    – Pratik
    Apr 18, 2019 at 14:31

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