On Thu, 23 Jan 2014 04:51:50 -0500 (EST)
Kamil Paral <kparal(a)redhat.com> wrote:
> I was able to get the root uri display a similar page as what a
> logged in user can see:
>
>
https://phab.qadevel-stg.cloud.fedoraproject.org/
I see only the sidebar and a blank page:
http://i.imgur.com/Z8EBlDx.png
Is that expected? Could we for example display the Feed contents on
that blank page?
Yes, that is expected. I thought I mentioned it, but obviously that
didn't happen.
As part of making the landing page public, I had to disable most of the
queries that populate the main panel when folks are logged in since
they used user-specific data. I didn't populate it with anything new
since it was mostly a proof of concept, though.
We can change how that page is populated to make it look more like
blender's site or do pretty much whatever we want with it. Static HTML
is the easiest thing to do but once we get into hacking at the page,
changing stuff isn't a huge deal.
>
> It does require hacking on the code and as near as I can tell, the
> changes can't be done as an extension. The changes are pretty sane,
> though so I'll start a conversation with upstream on whether they'd
> be interested in a patch.
Great. However, I wouldn't like to keep you distracted from
Taskotron. I was interested in some changes, if they are possible, to
improve the public access. But at the moment I think it's not as
important as coding the Taskotron basic infrastructure. So it depends
how much time-consuming this is.
Agreed. I'm planning to focus on taskotron runner stuff today since
multiple folks are blocked on that work. Once we figure out what we'd
want in the main panel for the public landing page, I'll update
phabricator to a newer revision and include the changes as a patch.
> Changing the sidebar layout, however, is a different story. The
> placement logic uses metadata in the code to determine where the
> icons are placed and how big they are. This is great from a dev
> point of view because you don't need any crazy logic for layout or
> need to update it all the time. Not so much if you want to change
> the default layout, though.
>
> If we want to change the default layout, I see 3 options:
>
> 1. maintain an out-of-band patch that either changes the application
> metadata so that the display works how we want or change the
> display logic so that it works differently.
>
> This is how the blender instance is set up - they changed the
> metadata in applications so that they would be rendered
> differently from the defaults. Not the prettiest thing ever but
> reasonably maintainable and effective. I suspect this would cause
> problems with any custom layouts that folks set, though.
>
>
> 2. hack a hard-coded default into the display logic, overriding the
> current logic-based defaults.
>
> This should allow for users to customize the sidebar as they
> want while not being a terrible hack. It would require more work
> and a decent understanding of the codebase, though. I also suspect
> that maintenance would be a bit more difficult.
>
>
> 3. Work with upstream (if they're interested) on a way to set a
> default layout for the sidebar.
>
> This would be quite a bit of work, assuming that upstream would
> even be interested in the functionality. It would be most
> likely to not cause maintenance headaches in the future, though.
>
>
> If we're going to change the sidebar layout, I'm of the opinion that
> option 1 is the best for us, for now. We're already on a tight
> deadline and I don't want to spend too much more time hacking on
> support tools right now. FAS auth integration is already going to
> take some work, so there's that task for the near future as well
> but phabricator already has persona auth support and I'm not
> expecting that task to be terrible.
The interesting thing is that a registered user can already override
the application metadata inside his user preferences dialog. I don't
talk about arrangement of the tiles, but you can influence their size
and visibility. It's a bit surprising that these defaults can't be
adjusted on the application level.
Yeah, that's part of user preferences which are stored in the database.
The rendering code is basically default-logic-or-user-preferences. I
imagine that it would be possible to change the rendering to have some
sort of default but I suspect that would require a db change and I'm
not willing to maintain an out-of-band patch like that - it's just
asking for upgrade problems.
Tim, have you tried the simplest route of just listing all the
applications that we don't want to use in "uninstalled-applications"
option? I would like to avoid any more custom patches for the moment,
and IIIUC this should give us want we want without any complications.
We can always enable a particular application again if we decide to
use it. And it gives us what we want - less cluttered sidebar.
Not yet, no. I haven't really tried the hacking part either - I just
found it when I was looking through blender's modifications for making
the landing page not require login.
We can also disable Beta applications inside Phab configuration,
because I believe we don't use any of them? Another way to trim down
what we see by default.
There are beta apps that I'm interested in: pholio (design review),
chatlog, ponder (FAQ) and the upcoming feature for a kanban/trello-ish
board. However, most of the beta features are things that I can't
really see us using much.
I'll poke at it as I have time but for today, coding is a higher
priority :)
Tim