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Add ability to customize commit messages when editing guides

Open durden opened this issue 9 years ago • 3 comments

Currently it's difficult for editors to properly share the reasoning behind their edit suggestions with the original author. We could use commit messages for this. The idea is to add a small box to the UI when editing a guide you did not originally start. This would get passed along in the commit message via the Github API for the commit to the branch where the edits live.

durden avatar Feb 24 '16 18:02 durden

I agree with @durden . I am editing one of the articles directly on the website. Currently, all edits are saved with a very generic commit message along the lines "Updates to article_name". Every time I hit 'save', I need to be able to provide a small description of what I changed, and why. This is specially useful for the original author who would want to see the reasoning behind why something was added, removed or modified.

NabaSadiaSiddiqui avatar Mar 17 '16 09:03 NabaSadiaSiddiqui

Another idea would be to try using a code review tool for this feedback between editors and authors. I recently came across the Omniref tool, which is a new approach to code review for github repositories. It's also free to try for open source repos. I could enable it if any authors and editors are willing to give it a trial run and provide feedback. @prtkgpt what do you think?

durden avatar Apr 05 '16 12:04 durden

Adding a commit message box to the create/edit guide process has some other benefits:

  1. Provides useful information in the github repository
    • Currently all the commit messages are very generic so looking through the git log is not very useful.
  2. Allows authors to provide a summary of their guide when first creating it.
    • This summary could be useful for our sharing tools because we could automatically include the summary for facebook/tweets/etc.

durden avatar Jun 16 '16 09:06 durden