Welcome to the New WedaCon Blog!

At WedaCon we are always looking for ways to enhance our expertise in Identity and Access Management and provide valuable content to our audience. Our blog has been a valuable resource for key insights in IAM and other related topics, but until now, it has been a static website with limited flexibility and efficiency. The latest changes of our blog bring a range of benefits that will make it more dynamic and efficient. Let’s dive into the changes we’ve made, why we made them, and what you can expect from us moving forward.

Switching to Hugo

In the past, our website and blog articles where based on static HTML pages and some scripting in it. Updating content was not straight forward, and represented a major burden (in terms of time and skills required). Classic Content Management Systems (CMS) were not an option for us, for several reasons, one of them was: ‘security’.

So we decided to split our websites: We refactored the classical landing page (https://www.wedacon.net) and removed all potentially problematic and hard to maintain elements (scripting, cookies, etc). That part is still static and will not be updated that often.

For the ‘blog’ section (https://blog.wedacon.net), we are now using a static site generator: Hugo. This change has enabled us to streamline our content creation process, making it easier for us to produce and publish high-quality articles, blog posts, and other online content.

The previous blog with its simple HTML template meant that every update required manual changes in the source code of our website. While this served us well for years, it became increasingly clear that we needed a more scalable, automated solution to keep pace with our growing content - and Hugo was the perfect choice. With Hugo’s robust features and user-friendly and responsive themes, we can now focus on what matters most – creating informative content for our audience.

By switching to Hugo Site Generator, we now enjoy:

• Speed & Performance: Hugo generates static sites extremely fast, improving page load times.
• Flexible Content Management: We can write, edit, and update articles effortlessly.
• Improved Scalability: As our content library expands, managing posts is much easier than before.

Knowledge Management Made Easy with BookStack

To further enhance our content management process, we’ve integrated our knowledge management system BookStack into our workflow. BookStack allows us to create, manage, and organize our content in a centralized hub, making it easier to collaborate, review, and publish our work. Being our internal knowledge management system BookStack also ensures that we can store, manage, and access all our articles, guides, and other content in one place. We can easily search and reuse our existing content, making it easier to maintain consistency. It becomes a digital archive of all our content making it independent of the online presence or CMS we are using.

How the New Pipeline Enhances Our Workflow

One of the most significant upgrades is our automated content pipeline, which ensures a smooth transition from content creation to publication. Leveraging the power of BookStack and Git, here’s an overview of how it works:

1. Dedicated Blog Book : We’ve created a specially dedicated book within our Knowledge Management System (KMS) that contains all our blog entries. This centralized repository allows us to manage and organize our content in one place.
2. New Page Creation : When a new page is created within this dedicated book, it automatically triggers a push to our Quality Stage blog.
3. Review and Approval : The new content is then reviewed on the Quality Stage blog. If it meets our quality standards, a merge request is created to integrate the changes into our productive branch of the blog.
4. Publication : After a review by a second person, the updated content is merged into our production branch, and our public blog is updated with the latest information.

What This Means for You

Our automated content pipeline is designed to provide a better experience for our readers. With this new process in place, you can expect:

• More Frequent Updates: We’ll be able to publish new content more regularly, keeping you informed about the latest developments.
• Improved Content Quality: Our review process ensures that all pieces of content meets our high standards, providing you with readable, accurate and informative articles.
• Better User Experience: Faster load times with the help of Hugo and better organization with the help of BookStack make it easier to find relevant content.

Looking Ahead

As we continue to evolve and expand our content, we invite you to join us on this journey. Stay tuned for more news about our company, insightful articles and expert opinions that deal with the complexities and opportunities of IAM and its related topics.

Note/ Disclaimer: This article was written with the help of our own, locally running LLM Environment (here: llama3.3)