Decide on design for the announcements page

[jseager7]

We recently agreed to add a page to the website to record previous announcements, for example announcements shown in the announcements banner (see #82) or in the PHI Spotlight section of the home page.

The page should be editable with Strapi, and the design of the page can be the same as most other pages on the website that are editable with Strapi. A mockup is shown in the image below.

The PHI-base team still has to decide on the following questions:

• Should the name of the page in the URL be announcements, or something more general, like news?
• Where should we display a link to this page?
• What text should we use for the link? 'Announcements', 'News', 'News and announcements', or something else?

@CuzickA @martin2urban What are your thoughts on these questions?

In terms of the link to the announcements page, I don't want to use the navigation bar because it has enough links already. I've described some other options below.

Link option 1

One option is to add the link to the 'PHI-base Data' section in the middle of the page:

If we do this, we might want to rename the 'PHI-base Data' section to something more generic, like 'Quick links', since the 'announcements' link is not related to data.

We'd also have to decide whether we want to show the link at the end of the section, or earlier in the list.

I think the icon for the link should be a bullhorn (megaphone), as shown in the image below:

For reference, the CSS class for this icon is "fa-solid fa-bullhorn".

Link option 2

Another option is to include the link at the end of the PHI Spotlight section:

[CuzickA]

@jseager7 thanks for providing the mock ups.

I was having a look at some of the other resources for ideas and noted the following.

Looking at UniProt and they currently have an announcement on their front page using an 'i' (I guess this is 'information'). I'm not if sure if there is a 'page' that contains past information announcements.

And ensembl genomes use this orange icon and link out to https://www.ensembl.info/ with announcements, jobs, tweets, known bugs and blogs (including a nice one from Nishadi with a photo from the NSL). https://www.ensembl.info/

PomBase https://www.pombase.org/ have several sections 'spotlight', 'tweets' and 'recent news'. The 'spotlight' section also has an archive link to previous spotlights.

Is the plan for our new link to store 'past announcements' and act as an archive for the 'PHI spotlight'?

If we need to make a temporary announcement that the server is down for maintenance etc do we want to keep a long term record of each time this happens in this new announcements link or are we more interested in recording announcements related to jobs, PHI-base releases, workshops etc?

[jseager7]

And ensembl genomes use this orange icon

FYI, that's the icon for an RSS feed. We won't be using that on the PHI-base 5 website.

Is the plan for our new link to store 'past announcements' and act as an archive for the 'PHI spotlight'?

Yes, but the archive will be manually maintained so we won't have to keep a record of the announcements for server maintenance, for example.

In practical terms, the announcements page might end up as a combination of spotlight, announcements, and other news.

[CuzickA]

For the 'PHI spotlight' would it make sense to create an archive link at the bottom of the spotlight section like PomBase?

[jseager7]

For the 'PHI spotlight' would it make sense to create an archive link at the bottom of the spotlight section like PomBase?

If we decide to put the announcements page link at the bottom of the spotlight section then we could just add a section to the announcements page with an archive of past spotlights.

If we decide to add the announcements page link somewhere else, then it will probably be out of scope to add another page just for a spotlight archive since MC said adding editable pages with Strapi took considerable effort. Making the archive populate itself automatically would be even more work.

There is a workaround: we can link to the announcements page in two places, but the spotlight archive link will go to a subheading of the announcements page (for the section containing past spotlight announcements). Maybe that's what you meant.

(Note that the above solution assumes that it's possible to add identifiers to headings using Strapi; if not, then this solution won't work.)

[CuzickA]

Would you consider adding the announcements link page to the left hand selection of links?

We could also have the link under the PHI spotlight as suggested in your option 2 mock up above.

[jseager7]

Would you consider adding the announcements link page to the left hand selection of links?

I'd be okay with that. I don't really have any strong preference where the link goes, I was just trying to get consensus.

If we add the link to the sidebar, I think the link should be placed under 'External resources' since the links above that seem to be related more to data.

[CuzickA]

Could it have its own link in the sidebar? I think many of the announcements or PHI spotlights will be do to with PHI-base and so not really 'External resources'.

[CuzickA]

Oh, maybe you meant that the new link could be placed in between the 'External resources' and the 'Wikipedia page'.

[jseager7]

Oh, maybe you meant that the new link could be placed in between the 'External resources' and the 'Wikipedia page'.

Yep, that's what I meant.

[CuzickA]

So now we need to decide what to call it. If we stick with 'announcements' this is a nice short title for the link out box in the sidebar. As mentioned above we could also have a link at the bottom of the PHI spotlight to indicate that the PHI spotlight archive is stored within the 'announcements' side bar link.

Would we call this 'more announcements' or 'PHI spotlight archive'?

[jseager7]

Would we call this 'more announcements' or 'PHI spotlight archive'?

For the spotlight archive link I'd suggest the following:

• Spotlight archive
• View previous spotlights
• Previous spotlights

[CuzickA]

'View previous spotlights'

This option is nice and clear. The other options would also be fine with me.

[jseager7]

In today's meeting we decided:

• to include a link to the announcements page in the PHI-base Data section,
• to rename the PHI-base Data section to 'Quick links', and
• to include a 'View previous spotlights' link at the bottom of the the Spotlight section.

I'll open a new issue for the implementation of this design.