EPIC: Mini CMS - Content management for dataset guidance

[CharliePatterson]

Context:

There are two types of guidance produced for data specifications:

• technical specifications, e.g. Article 4 directions, which defines the format for how Article 4 directions must be provided as data (a technical document)
• guidance for data providers, e.g. Article 4 directions, which provides a step-by-step guide for how to prepare data to meet the specifications (a user-facing document)

Guidance is more user-friendly than a technical specification and deliberately omits certain fields a data provider may not have to provide, for example, organisation which can be inferred from the organisation providing the data. They don’t need to provide it because the pipeline can add it.

Technical specifications can be produced automatically from the template for a technical specification and the data specification itself. However, guidance for data providers is currently hard-coded on the main planning.data.gov.uk website. This means user-facing guidance can sometimes be inconsistent with the technical specifications, and multiple pull requests need to be raised in order to make a small change. This has left data providers confused in the past, which means they don’t prepare or provide data until the inconsistency has been addressed.

It’s also not ideal that users need to navigate away from the Submit & Update service when preparing and checking data. Providing snippets of guidance inside the service, rather than on other pages, would reduce the interaction costs associated with navigating to another web page. It gives users information at the point they need it. Embedding guidance directly into the check tool minimises disruption and improves task focus.

Goals:

1. Enable snippets of dataset guidance content to be displayed contextually.
2. Have a single source of truth for dataset guidance content.
3. Enable content designers to easily edit and publish changes to dataset guidance content.

Approach:

• Use the 'guidance' field in the specification.
• Map guidance content snippets to each field in the spec.
• Update the specification files to include this content.
• Build a "mini CMS" to enable content designers to manage (edit, publish) this content.
• Update the service to fetch guidance content from the specification.
• Update the dataset guidance pages to fetch content from the specification.

[DilwoarH]

Spoke to the infrastructure team about deployment. This is the following plan:

1. Push the container image to AWS ECR
2. Use App Runner to host the product

Other things to note:

• We will only deploy on development to start with
• We will use the URL generated by AWS until we have a fully built service

[neilfwar]

@stevenjmesser we need to decide where Mini CMS should permanently live in team ownership?