Announcing the PowerShell Community Blog

Doctor Scripto

We are proud to announce a new blog dedicated to PowerShell and focused on the community. This is a blog by the community and for the community. And we have made it easier than ever for you to contribute to the new blog.

It all started with a generous offer from a member of the community, Thomas Lee (@doctordns).

doctordns-tweet

We knew we had a great opportunity here. But, rather than fixing the content in the Scripting blog, what we really needed was a fresh start. So we decided to retire the Scripting blog and create this new one.

A blog for the community

Like the Scripting blog, this new blog is focused on teaching you about PowerShell, answering your questions, and providing interesting and useful examples. We will continue to use the scripter@microsoft.com mailbox to accept your questions. But there are new ways to engage with this blog.

A blog by the community

On the Scripting blog, it was possible for members of the community to submit blog posts to our email address. The Scripting Guys would review the offered content and publish the post for you.

With the new blog we have a new way to contribute. All posts to this blog are open-source Markdown files stored on GitHub. You can share your own knowledge by submitting pull requests. And you can use the Issues system to ask question, point out problems, or suggest ideas for new posts.

Getting started

Thomas Lee already has several posts from the old Scripting blog that he has updated and corrected. Look for those posts here in the coming weeks. If you have other posts from the old blog that you would like to see updated, please open an issue in the Community-Blog repository.

The content in the Scripting blog is not going away. But rather than updating the posts there, where they will be lost among the 5400+ existing posts, the updated post will be published here as fresh content that is easy to find.

So now it’s your turn. Check out this page to learn how to get started.

12 comments

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  • govgeek 0

    Sweet!

  • Clifton Dunaway 0

    Glad to see this blog resurrected!

  • Sean Harper 0

    What does the original Scripting Guy think about this?

  • setsunaFTW 0

    Good stuff!

  • James Miller 0

    That’s great!
    I still refer to those old posts from time to time.

  • Jonathan Birkett 0

    Excelllent!

  • PandaSharp 0

    I love the fact that almost all MS products are moving to the same platform for docs (docs.microsoft.com) and blogs (devblogs.microsoft.com) it brings a beautiful consistency … except for VS code, they’re still on their inconsistent own platform, that’s a real pity!

    • @DoctorDNS 0

      The move to open sourcing both documentation and product development at Microsoft has been nothing short of amazing. I once asked Steve Ballmer, in a small meeting, what he thought about Linux. I think it fair to say he was not a fan of open source. In those days, the idea of open-sourcing .NET and PowerShell would have been simply unthinkable. But then it happened. What open sourcing has done is to improve the velocity. It also harnesses the community. In the early days, I used to go mental with the idea that it could take years to fix trivial doc errors and that I could not just do it. The first time I demonstrated an error in the help file fixed and submitted was a light bulb moment for me. The platform of Github at the back end and either the docs.microsoft.com platform or the WordPress blogging infrastructure at the front end is very compelling. And open-sourcing their development seems to be a winner too, with community PRs representing free dev and documentation time from some smart people. Just about any product would have to be crazy not to leverage the documentation platform (and their product’s community) at a minimum. As for VSCode – they do appear to be using GitHub at the back end for documentation (https://github.com/microsoft/vscode-docs) and for development (https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/).

      • PandaSharp 0

        Yeah, unfortunately this is the reply that I got when I asked for this first, and than the conversation locked and limited after I asked for further details:
        https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/issues/74939

  • TimA 0

    Just curious, Am I reading this correctly? If I want to ask a scripting question now? I need to open a WordPress account/ It get switched to Author/ find some place to make a branch of a git hub project/ format my project with special headers

    Before my question is determined to be posted?

    So, if my question was something like, I want to format my PowerShell object results in xxxxxxx way….. I’d need to do all those things 1st?

    • @DoctorDNS 0

      You may be over analysing this! 🙂

      This blog is intended to show the community how to do things in PowerShell. With that aim, as a member of the community, you have several different modes of interaction each of which has different requirements:
      1. If you just want to read the blogs, then just go ahead. no accounts are needed.
      2. If you want to read and join in the comments on any blog entry, yes you need a word press account. This is simple and free and is a requirement, so far as I am aware, of any MS blogging property.
      3. If you want to contribute to the blog by suggesting topics to be covered, you also need a GitHub account and you log in to our GitHub repo and file an issue under your GitHub account. If there is something you would like a blog article or more about, then file an issue where you explain why the issue matters (to IT Pro), what options exist for the solution, and how you think it should be covered. Make the issue as long or as short as necessary or as you are able. You can take a look at the current issues to get a feel for what a good issue should contain. I am working with Sean to ensure we have some good documentation on what makes a good issue report.
      4. If you want to contribute an article to the blog, then you need to have both accounts (GitHub and WordPress), and know your way around GitHub and Markdown.

      As an aside, being a post author is a lot more work. GitHub, the Git client, as well as markdown, represent a big learning curve. And not only do you need skills in those areas, but you also need to be able to write in clear, technical (American) English. Oh – and you also need to expect comments. The people doing reviews today on content are hard but fair. You have to be able to take criticism, argue your points, and, being flexible, come up with a better article as a result.

  • Grzegorz Grondziel 0

    Fantastic!

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