How to best link documentation sites together and expose resources

[smit1678]

Problem:

Currently we have several content sites that are independent and managed separately. They are loosely linked together but maintained by HOT. The number of content sites may grow (new reports or resources that we want to create and put online). The issue is how do we create an entry point to what is available and where is it?

Additionally, we also have on hotosm.org reports, like Participatory Mapping Toolkit or Annual Report, that may not be within a documentation site but have a document that needs to be made available. For the Participatory Mapping Toolkit, we have a dedicated page at https://www.hotosm.org/resources/participatory-mapping-toolkit/. Currently there is no index view at https://www.hotosm.org/resources/.

Initial idea:

Create an index of available resources on hotosm.org at /resources: https://www.hotosm.org/resources/. Plus create a resources list on the Toolbox: https://hotosm.github.io/toolkit-site/. This way we could be linking from our main, flagship resource plus creating a page on hotosm.org that serves as a landing page for what is available.

We could leverage the card functionality so that items like title, a description, and other descriptive tags or information could be exposed. This could also be then indexed into the search on the site. Example card page (but not exactly how we would implement): https://www.hotosm.org/community/community-grants/. One inspiration site is https://www.odi.org/publications.

In the future as the list grows, quick filtering on the page by tag or theme could be implemented when the list grows too long.

Listing this here for discussion instead of on hotosm.org repo since we're tying this work to the second round of development on the documentation site

cc @PaulUithol @jessbeutler @TylerRadford @jbergmann91 @AlexGlynnHOT @hotosm/hot-staff @ramyaragupathy @katia-utochkina

[smit1678]

Update on progress here after design work:

Taking the Toolbox as a flagship documentation site, we can use that as place for linking to other documentation sites. Here is a proposed way this could be done via a landing page and a header:

Full designs here: https://projects.invisionapp.com/share/JSSNSP172CK#/screens

Consideration

What about the other documentation sites? Do they have a landing page or the global header? How do we manage that global header? @russbiggs and I discussed this a bit and are going to get some feedback from Major on how we can handle this within the design.

[russbiggs]

I spoke with Leihla today about an additional landing page for each site. She and her team will be getting that to us soon with some other changes to the original design. This should give us a cleaner way to direct link to a site and give some amount of introduction to the individual sites. Then at the global level we have the original landing page design as well that will link to all other documentation sites. Still not totally sure about the "Browse Docs" drop down in the toolbox site only or how that can fit into the larger navigation story