Using a module in multiple learning paths

[lukpan]

Hello enablement tech ninjas,

Today I was working on the landing page for the Developer Essentials learning path/microsite. I have already pushed my work to this PR.

We want to re-use one of the modules that we have initially published in the administrator learning path/microsite in the developer essentials learning path. When I tried to add the links in the developer essentials navigation file, I realised that the links in the navigation would then take the learner to the module in the administrator learning path, which isn't really the behaviour we want.

Ideally, we would be able to reuse the same content in multiple learning paths, without having to duplicate the content across multiple microsites which would make maintaining the content difficult over time. @FFawzy mentioned that maybe something like 'reusable snippets' might be an approach that could solve this problem, but I leave this in your more than capable hands!

I've attached a video to show what I mean as well. Any questions, please just let me know. Cheers!

Uploading Screen Recording 2024-05-29 at 18.16.07.mov…

[lukpan]

Screencast

[gabriele-ct]

@FFawzy
I made a test using symlinks

apart from link check failing (I just got some random content to be linked, so I wouldn't care too much), it seems to be working. Let's have a chat about the possible drawbacks of this approach. At least from a build and deploy POV seems to be a viable approach

[gabriele-ct]

@nkuehn We'd like to know your opinion on this approach.
A bit of background:
We got this request from self-learning team about the ability of re-use some modules in different learning paths (different websites).

In this PR (which is just a POC, it will not be merged) I created symlinks between a self-learning module which I have extracted to an non-website directory and 2 self learning websites.
The result seems to be working but we'd like to know if you see any issues with going ahead with such approach.

Thank you

[nkuehn]

Hi, (+ including @zbalek )

To me, duplicating the same content into a different URL and having it in multiple places in the site hierarchy is no-go, google search und users alike will hate us for that. Google search imho activey punishes for duplicate content (at least, if it's not properly using the canonical tag to make clear it's just a different URL for the same stuff).

We had only briefly touched it in the self-learning group and my vote was to not do it until we have a "proper" UX / UI concept for learning that decouples the modules from the learning paths a bit. Technology wise, it would gravitate towards selflearning becoming one big microsite (or, for that matter, a post-gatsby project?).

The specific case discussed was an introductory / general module in that case. For such I think we can make transparent to the user that they need to take it in the other learning path and then return.

PS on the technical end, syminks in my experience overwhelm authors and potentially create issues with VSCode, operating systems etc even if they work on git level.

(I have no access to the screencast linked above, so maybe what I say here does not make sense)