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Feature #14180

closed

Design/UX #13998: Homepage Redesign

"Featured" flag tool for groups and sites

Added by Boone Gorges about 3 years ago. Updated about 2 years ago.

Status:
Resolved
Priority name:
Normal
Assignee:
Category name:
Home Page
Target version:
Start date:
2021-03-16
Due date:
% Done:

100%

Estimated time:
(Total: 0.00 h)
Deployment actions:

Description

The 1.19 homepage design introduces new 'Featured Sites' and 'Featured Groups' areas. See latest wireframes linked from https://redmine.gc.cuny.edu/issues/13999#note-21.

The old version of the homepage uses the cac-featured-content plugin, which creates a widget where the admin can select a single item to feature, and can also provide custom markup, descriptions, etc for the widget.

The new version will allow us to retire cac-featured-content. Instead, we will have "pools" of sites and groups that have been flagged as Featured. Items in the 'Featured Sites' and 'Featured Groups' areas on the homepage will then be pulled randomly from these pools.

As such, we'll need a new interface that allows the CAC team to specify which groups and sites are in the "pool". This will require a couple of things.

First, we'll need some mechanism for storing the "featured" status. Probably a simple flag in groupmeta and sitemeta will work. We'll also need CRUD tools for toggling the flag. (If we use meta, then we can simply use meta_query to pull up the list when we build the homepage itself, and we shouldn't need additional "fetch" wrappers.)

Next, we'll need a UX where the CAC team can managed the "pools". Given the fact that the interface for managing Sites in Network Admin is very different from that for managing Groups, I think we probably can't easily integrate into those existing UIs, and should build a new one instead. On that interface, we need:
1. The ability to see a list of all items that are currently Featured
2. The ability to remove existing items from the Featured list
3. The ability to add new items. I imagine this could be an autocomplete that matches names or slugs/URLs.

I think we want to make the interface accessible to anyone who is an Editor on the main site, since we have so few Super Admins and we don't want to create a curation bottleneck.

Jeremy, I'm tentatively assigning this to you. Given this rough spec, can you envision a workable UI? This is a tool that will be used only by the CAC team, so it doesn't need to be extremely beautiful, but it should be easy to read and to use. I think it's OK to make it require JS, and you should feel free to use whatever library you want (thinking here specifically of the autocomplete tool - jquery-ui, select2, or something more modern). No need to use a full JS framework unless it's easier to do so.


Files

Screenshot_2021-03-22_15-04-58.png (11 KB) Screenshot_2021-03-22_15-04-58.png Boone Gorges, 2021-03-23 01:44 PM
featured-area.png (34.8 KB) featured-area.png Colin McDonald, 2021-03-30 12:29 PM
Peek 2021-07-29 11-21.gif (250 KB) Peek 2021-07-29 11-21.gif Boone Gorges, 2021-07-29 12:22 PM
Screen Shot 2021-10-27 at 4.28.41 PM.png (563 KB) Screen Shot 2021-10-27 at 4.28.41 PM.png Colin McDonald, 2021-10-27 04:28 PM

Subtasks 1 (0 open1 closed)

Feature #14179: Featured Sites and Groups for Home Page RedesignResolvedColin McDonald2021-03-16

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