Reorganizing the content UX

[corywatilo]

A couple years ago, we decided to try to make our posts section like HN where you can upvote articles. But we never really saw the vision through.

What did come out of it was content hubs, with sections geared at founders and product engineers. (Each hub has tags inside of them.)

One option we had considered (but didn't really follow through with) was the idea of the content hubs being more like books that you can read from start to finish – or you can of course skip around to read specific articles interesting to you. The best analogy for this is the handbook, where this approach works quite well. It's basically set up as the guided book with chapters, and also has appendixes for different sections that don't fit into the chapter format.

This idea came up again last week with @daniloc, and I think it's worth us moving in this direction.

Specifically, what I think would be really cool is for it to be a "living book" where not all articles are written, but we have a placeholder in the form of a chapter title. Visitors could upvote the chapter title if they want to read it, which can help us prioritize what content to write.

In our original concept, we had also floated the idea of not writing articles where a great resource already exists for it on the internet. In this case we'd just link out to the article. We have this technically set up already - this is actually why we built the client-side new post editor. The idea was we'd write a preface for the external article, then link out to it.

So basically any long-form posts we're writing, we continue to author in Markdown and keep in the repo. Then external articles are added in the client-side editor.

The idea...

In this wire below, there are a few things to note:

• Preface: This is part of a larger redesign where we introduce a left nav. (Ignore this for the sake of the current topic.)
• The top-level nav for this section, I have currently named "Content gold mine" because the name "Resources" absolutely sucks and this has more personality
• The hub chapters are broken down by topic, and you can see each article listed inside
• If an article doesn't exist yet, it's grayed out in italics and you can "vote" on having the article written
  • This pattern could be used in other places, too – like even our blog, or for comparison guides. We could even add this concept to docs where we have @todos to write certain articles.

Next steps

Assuming there are no issues with this idea, we need to put together a comprehensive list of articles we'd write about so we can categorize them correctly, and use that as a content roadmap. (Basically there's a lot of stuff from #content-ideas that could be organized into categories between here and the other content sections.)