This part of the handbook is for the blog editorial team. If this isn't you, you may find what you are looking for in the blog handbook, which covers the process for opening an issue and merge request for your blog post, as well as getting reviewed and published.
We use American English by default.
When using acryonyms or initialisms, ensure that your first mention uses the full term and includes the shortened version in parentheses directly afterwards. From then on you may use the acronym or initialism instead.
Example: A Contributor License Agreement (CLA) is the industry standard for open source contributions to other projects.
Below are some common acronyms and initialisms we use which don't need to be defined first (but use sparingly, see Tone of voice above):
Use ampersands only where they are part of a company's name or the title of a publication or similar. Example: Barnes & Noble
Do not use as a substitute for "and."
See below for styling of specific words.
Use sentence case for all titles and headings.
All GitLab feature names must be capitalized. If referring to a GitLab feature as part of a workflow rather than speaking about the feature itself, use lower case.
Examples: "GitLab Issue Boards are a powerful project management and collaboration tool." vs "The editorial team uses an issue board to track the progress of blog posts."
We do not capitalize job titles, regardless of whether they appear before or after a person's name.
These are elements that make up GitLab the company's organizational structure. Capitalize the name of the element, but not the word after:
Example: Engineering function, Security department
Capitalize the first letter of a proper noun, regardless of how it is styled in a company's logo, for example.
Examples: Reddit, Lego
We favor contractions ("can't," "didn't," "it's," "we're") to sound more human and less formal.
Spell out, unless using the full date (see below).
Jan. 3, 2019 (abbreviate month, no rd after 3)
These do not need to be full sentences. Do not include a period at the end of any headings.
Try to avoid vague blog post titles, especially beginning with continuous verbs ("-ing"). Make them active and descriptive so that readers know what they can expect to gain from reading the post.
Examples:
Reducing DevOps costs-> How to reduce DevOps costs
Beautifying our UI-> What we're doing to beautify our UI
Use * or - to create a bulleted list in Markdown. No period is necessary at the end of each bullet point.
Numbers with four or more digits should include a comma.
Examples: 2,000; 100,000
Spell out one to nine. Use numerals for 10 upwards. Try to avoid beginning a sentence with a number, but if unavoidable, spell it out.
Use numerals. If at the beginning of a heading, capitalize the first word following.
Example: 3 Strategies for implementing a microservices architecture
Unless referring to someone in particular, use gender-neutral pronouns ("they", "them").
Only one space after a period is necessary.
Include one space after ellipses (… )
See below for when to hyphenate specific words.
We use en dashes (–) rather than em dashes (—). Include a space before and after the dash.
Use % instead of "percent" at all times.
Use double quotation marks for direct quotes, and single quotation marks for a quote within a quote. Single quotation marks may also be used for specialist terms or sayings.
Include punctuation in quotation marks.
Example: What do you think of the claim, "software is eating the world?"
When including direct quotations from interviewees in blog posts, we prefer to use the feature journalism style of present tense for verbs such as "said," "explained" etc.
Example: "Ruby was optimized for the developer, not for running it in production," says Sid.
For blog posts, prefer referring to interviewees by their first names as this is less formal and more in keeping with our tone of voice.
Active voice is preferred to passive voice in blog posts. Voice describes whether the subject of a sentence receives or performs the action of a verb.
Example: "The GitLab community submitted 1 million merge requests in March 2019." (active) vs. "One million merge requests were submitted by the GitLab community in March 2019." (passive)
When in doubt, use the "future" styling of a word. So, "internet" is not capitalized, "startup" is not hyphenated, etc.
How to spell and style commonly used words.
Use American spelling in your communications. Please consult this list of spelling differences.
gitlab been added to the author_twitter field if the author doesn't wish to use their own handle?Description field copy fit on the tile on /blog?culture, engineering, or open source it is best to remove it..html.md.erb and that the newsletter sign-up form is included in the post, if appropriate. Don't include it if there are other CTAs in the post (for example, directing people to sign up for a webcast or watch a video).