News: Add articles from 2022 to March 2026

[marcuspollio]

Description

Add the News section articles from the very beginning of the News blog in August 2022 to March 2026.

The content has been exported from Wordpress (thanks to @prokoudine), restructured and cleaned up for use in Hugo SSG:

• front matter fields
• mostly correct markdown syntax
• shortcodes support for Youtube, PeerTube and bundled video files
• most images have been converted to WebP
• and probably misc tweaks I cannot remember

Paths are: /content/en/news/<YYYY>/<MM>/<slug>/index.md
Content and resources use Hugo page bundles.
No translations for now.

The rest (e.g. layout, render hooks, etc.) are provided by the theme (see previous PRs).

Authors attribution is set via authors field in front matter, and git co-authors commit message.

Note

Live preview for this PR

PR Checklist

• This change is verified to work as described.
• This change complies with the repository Guidelines.

[github-actions]

PR #16 preview:

https://FreeCAD.github.io/Website/pr-16/

[marcuspollio]

FYI @prokoudine @sliptonic @chennes @edwilliams16 @concretedog @kkremitzki @FEA-eng @semhustej @yorikvanhavre

Hi everyone!

I tried to migrate your articles as cleanly as possible, but errors may have crept in 😁
Could you please check, for each of your respective article(s):

• Metadata fields in front matter: title, description if applicable (can be added if you want), authors, categories (there may some some mix-up, ideally one category by article), tags (I added some but very open to changes here, multiple tags are supported), cover image and caption (most articles have no cover, so indicate which image you prefer, none is also ok)
• Text: typos, formatting (bold, italic, underline, strikethrough, ^sup / _sub, etc), headings, links (title and url), lists, quotes, codeblocks, tables, footnotes, etc.
• Images: not missing and/or loading properly, caption and alt texts, no cropping, resolution, work well on dark theme, etc.
• Videos: not missing and/or loading properly, title, sound, controls, etc.
• Article slug and resources filenames (I used same as original but better change now than later, as we will need to add aliases).

To access quickly your respective articles, see this PR live preview of the authors taxonomy.
You can also see all News articles on the News archives page, where metadata is shown too (use search).
I you prefer to work locally with a clone of this repository, see the repo ReadMe for instructions.

You can list all content modifications you want directly here, mentioning the article title.
If you need more info, just ask away. 😉
Please leave a note when you are done.
Note that the theme style of the website is not final and may evolve in the coming months.

Thank you all, have a good one!

[concretedog]

Hey @marcuspollio the feature image stuff is totally broken in the current WP theme and not operating correctly so I'm not surprised that in the majority of cases they haven't appeared in this!

[semhustej]

Hi,

this is my article: https://freecad.github.io/Website/pr-16/news/explainer-appearance-properties-in-freecad/

These are issues I found:

1. bold text 2x

2. The Dash, Smaller than combination looks kinda odd

3. bold text 1x

4. Picture name should be transparency

5. Text alignment
   Blog posts should be left aligned. The block text alignment decreases readability of long text. I think this should be applied to all blog posts.

[prokoudine]

Top to bottom for any post:

1. Header: There's not much use for the number of words. We already have minutes estimation. They cancel each other out, and the minutes estimation is more human-friendly.

2. Header: I don't see the need for the number of posts for authors, categories, and tags in parenthesis.

3. Body: The are no left/right margins for content until the window is approx 2540px wide. For my screen, that makes text lines ~160 characters long, which is about twice as long as it should be for comfortable reading (75-80 is the recommended upper limit).

4. The body text's font size is small-ish, and the font size of both pagination items (title of prev/next posts) and footer text is tiny. Let's try an increase by 2px for both.

The various markup imperefections are expected for automatic conversion. We can clean that up progressively.

[concretedog]

Are there supposed to be comments? I'm not sure what was transferred in the archive?

…

On Tue, 14 Apr 2026 at 13:38, Aleksandr Prokudin ***@***.***> wrote: *prokoudine* left a comment (FreeCAD/Website#16) <#16 (comment)> Top to bottom for any post: 1. Header: There's not much use for the number of words. We already have minutes estimation. They cancel each other out, and the minutes estimation is more human-friendly. 2. Header: I don't see the need for the number of posts for authors, categories, and tags in parenthesis. 3. Body: The are no left/right margins for content until the window is approx 2540px wide. For my screen, that makes text lines ~160 characters long, which is about twice as long as it should be for comfortable reading (75-80 is the recommended upper limit). 4. The body text's font size is small-ish, and the font size of both pagination items (title of prev/next posts) and footer text is tiny. Let's try an increase by 2px for both. The various markup imperefections are expected for automatic conversion. We can clean that up progressively. — Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub <#16 (comment)>, or unsubscribe <https://github.com/notifications/unsubscribe-auth/AEHEK6NC4CAUFT7FTQKQVND4VYWNFAVCNFSM6AAAAACXXSWFRKVHI2DSMVQWIX3LMV43OSLTON2WKQ3PNVWWK3TUHM2DENBTHEZDKOJYG4> . You are receiving this because you were mentioned.Message ID: ***@***.***>

[prokoudine]

Not unless we add a third-party comments system. Hugo is a static website generator, it doesn't have a built-in one.

[marcuspollio]

@semhustej Thank you! I have corrected your reported issues. For the point 5 (text alignment), I am not sure I get what you mean? Currently, content text is justified with a left alignment for the last line (below on 1920x1080px):

Are you getting something else?
Edit: actually you posted screenshots above too 😁

@concretedog Hi! For the cover/feature images, they can be added here, just need to indicate which for every article. As for comments, it was agreed in 2024 that we do not have the resources to manage comments and that existing channels/social platforms can already fulfill this role. What do you think?

@prokoudine Hi! Could you please open a new issue for your theme remarks, as here it is about the news articles content. For your point 3, could you please provide a screenshot on the issue. On my side, I get margins and the content is about 100-110 chars wide (probably too much), instead of 90-100 for the current WP blog. So we can tweak that.

[semhustej]

@marcuspollio

The text is currently aligned to block, or Justified - so to the text left and the right side are in line. This makes the text less readable (my opinion), and may cause problems when viewing on mobile device with small width:

I think for blog posts (and most other text on web pages, which may be read on both desktop and mobile), the justification should be use Left, as an example the original blog:

If you look at most articles/blog posts on the internet, they are justified left. BBC as an example of a professional organization: https://www.bbc.com/sport/formula1/articles/cly9z7z7ee5o

I have very little knowledge of webdesign, but I think this is common practice. Maybe @prokoudine can chime in with his experience.

[marcuspollio]

I just pushed some more bulk cleanup, but there are probably more coming 😁

@chennes @prokoudine For the update/WIP articles, could you please advise how you want to format the commit author names: with or without bold, with or without @, with or without profile link, etc. Currently we have about every variants. I can do a quick harmonization if you agree on the form to use (will add later to script and guidelines too). Thanks!

[chennes]

I leave all blog decisions to Jo/Alex :)

[chennes]

@chennes Do you hand over the review/check of your articles to them as well?

Haha, no, I like those guys, I wouldn't do that to them 😆 -- I'm working on the review now, stay tuned.

[chennes]

Wow, this was sort of a fun "blast from the past" review. I had actually totally forgotten that I used to be the one doing the WIP Wednesday posts! Anyway, there are just a few formatting issues. If you are planning to eventually get those header images in there's nothing else to change. If that's not going to happen, then on several occasions I included the image citation directly in the text because the WP template is trash, and those should be dropped.

[edwilliams16]

Here are the edits to my article I've found:

The links should be to freecad not freecadweb.
**rotated ** should be bold rotated

rot * vector #or
rot.multVec(vector)
placement * vector #or placement.multVec(vector)

should be on separate lines as above

In R’ * S * S-1 = R’ = S * R * S-1 In code, this becomes:

both -1 should be superscripts

In
from FreeCAD import Vector as V
R = App.Rotation(V(1,0,0), 90)#90⁰ around x
S = App.Rotation(V(0,0,1), 90)#90⁰ around z
Rprime = S * R * S.inverted()

the degree superscripts aren't rendering (replace with deg- since it is input text?)

[marcuspollio]

@chennes @edwilliams16 Thanks. I have corrected your reported issues. Great that you had a fun blast from the past! Yes, I will try to add as many cover/feature images as possible with a proper <figcaption>. Have a good one!

[prokoudine]

@chennes @prokoudine For the update/WIP articles, could you please advise how you want to format the commit author names: with or without bold, with or without @, with or without profile link, etc. Currently we have about every variants. I can do a quick harmonization if you agree on the form to use (will add later to script and guidelines too). Thanks!

Not bold, no @, no profile links

[marcuspollio]

Not bold, no @, no profile links

Done! Was the easy one 😁

[marcuspollio]

Shall I wait a bit more on @prokoudine @sliptonic @concretedog @kkremitzki @FEA-eng @yorikvanhavre so they can answer if they want any changes to their articles, or if they are OK with current state?

[FEA-eng]

• most articles have no cover, so indicate which image you prefer

These two articles had cover images:
https://blog.freecad.org/2025/09/16/getting-started-with-fem/
https://blog.freecad.org/2025/09/09/what-is-new-in-fem-for-freecad-1-1/

This one could use the first image:
https://blog.freecad.org/2024/09/28/major-fem-workbench-improvements-for-freecad-1-0/

[FEA-eng]

Now all the images have captions, but they are just "image x" (at least in my case), and the numbers are often incorrect. Can they be removed?

[marcuspollio]

Hi @FEA-eng thanks for the feedback. Your reported issues are now fixed, and some more as well.
Yeah, there are still probably a few missing covers or odd captions here and there, I fix them in bulk as and when I spot some. 😉