Website refresh and GitHub Discussions

Quarkus website got a refresh and we enabled GitHub discussions for community conversations.

Website refresh

We’ve refreshed the look’n’feel with more contrast on pages for better readability.

Cleaned up navigation menu and made a no fuzz "Getting Started" section to show the absolute simplest set of steps to get started with Quarkus.

And finally we now have enabled for anyone with a GitHub account to comment on the blog.

To comment scroll to the bottom of any blog entry, click "Login with GitHub" and follow the instructions and you can now post a comment. This feature is implemented using GitHub Discussions so you will see them show up in GitHub Discussion category named Quarkus Blog/Website

GitHub Discussions

Back in August we started looking into enabling GitHub discussions for community conversations. Main drivers were that we felt the community were missing a place to post about all things Quarkus - not everything is a user question or a development idea for Quarkus. In additonal all the conversations in Zulip #user chat kept growing every day but every question answered are not discoverable by search engines. Yes, StackOverflow exist, but it has issues too - thus we needed something better. Enter GitHub Discussions.

If you are interested in the details, the rationale and considerations for GitHub discussions are described in detail in this pull-request.

GitHub Discussions for Quarkus Repository

Hopefully the categories are self-explanatory - intent is to have an initial set of categories as a starting place for discussions. We will add more categories as we get more feedback and see how users post.

One special category is Quarkus Blog/Website that is used for comments made on the blog.

Controlling notifications

Floods of notifications is a challenge we already have but with GitHub Discussions we have much better control than almost any other communication platform. To tweak those settings click the "Watch" button in the upper right corner on quarkusio/quarkus repository and turn on/off the areas as appropriate for you.

In addition GitHub discussions supports labelling of discussions the same way as for issues and pull requests. We plan on enabling the QuarkusBot to auto-label discussions in Q&A category to help with additional filtering and targeted notifications.

Feedback

GitHub Discussions is a new feature and we are looking forward to see what everyone will do with it. If you have feedback do tell us in Community discussions or even put as comment on this blog.

Hope you like the refresh and see you in the Discussions!

Have fun!