Spike: identify dotCMS releases with partial or missing changelog entries on dev.dotcms.com

Research Question

Which GA dotCMS releases have missing or incomplete changelog entries on dev.dotcms.com (Change logs, All Releases, Current Releases pages) because the changelog-site-publish-phase step of the release pipeline (cicd_6-release.yml → cicd_comp_changelog-site-publish-phase.yml) failed or didn't run as expected — and since when has this been happening?

Timebox

4h

Acceptance Criteria

• List every GA release since changelog-site-publish-phase went live where the site's changelog entry is missing or incomplete.
• For each one, determine which case it is:
  • Failed (exit 1, or the job didn't run) → needs backfill.
  • Protective skip (exit 0 with the ::changelog-skip:: marker — entry was hand-edited) → working as intended, does not need backfill.
• Confirm/root-cause Erick Gonzalez's 2026-08-31 report that "the changelogs automatizer isn't running" — isolated incident or ongoing pattern? (Note: this phase runs allow_failure, so a broken publish never fails the release itself — it can silently drift for a while before anyone notices, which is presumably why this went unnoticed.)
• Produce a concrete version list (needs-backfill vs. intentionally-skipped) and hand it to the companion backfill task.

Context

Flagged in this Slack thread while tainting v26.08.28-01 / v26.08.31-01 for the Users portlet regression (#37311). Erick: "also seems that your changelogs automatizer isn't running."

.github/actions/core-cicd/changelog-publisher/README.md documents the exit-code/skip contract this spike needs to read run logs against, and explicitly notes there is no automatic backfill (FR-012) — each release only publishes the version that triggered it, so any gap has to be found and closed by hand.

Links

• changelog-publisher README — exit-code contract, manual backfill procedure
• cicd_comp_changelog-site-publish-phase.yml
• GitHub Actions run history for cicd_6-release.yml (look at the changelog-site-publish-phase job per run) and #dot-releases Slack notifications
• Parent issue: #37316

Read .github/actions/core-cicd/changelog-publisher/README.md and cicd_comp_changelog-site-publish-phase.yml first, then inspect the changelog-site-publish-phase job in cicd_6-release.yml run history for each GA release. Compare exit codes and ::changelog-skip:: markers with the Change logs, All Releases, and Current Releases pages. Done means a versioned list of needs-backfill versus intentionally skipped releases, including the timeframe and findings for the reported incident.