Make Pages better for tech writers/website managers
NOTE: This content has moved to https://about.gitlab.com/direction/release/pages/
This will be a workspace for tech writers and PM to collaborate on how to make Pages better for our own internal use cases.
The docs team is considering moving to a different hosting provider; details on reasons why can be found at https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/gitlab-docs/issues/313.
The main difficulty with using Pages at www-gitlab-com (https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/www-gitlab-com) / GitLab documentation (https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/gitlab-docs) scale is
- Caching artifacts between pages runs
- We clear and recreate everything every time, but we could mark certain directories (mark certain folders as "do not rebuild", potentially detect what's different via only/except data), in which case these would just be persisted from the previous run. See comment https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/29498#note_149246568 for how this might look.
- The alternative is having your own server, where you can obviously just leave files there.
Other items
- Managing binary files inside of the repo that results in slow interactions and big initial download
- Maybe use LFS? Something else?
- Automatic duplicate checking or orphaned images checking
- May be quite complicated to detect references
- Redirects are a pain to manage, we only support meta refresh natively. Redirects could be handled in the Netlify way (
_redirects
file): https://www.netlify.com/docs/redirects/ - Review apps are working well right now.
- Neither Middleman nor Nanoc support incremental builds yet, but teams are working on that. Workspaces (https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/47062) would be valuable for a guaranteed workspace cache between steps/runs.
- Inline comments/issue reporting could also be interesting: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/53390