The information in this blogpost may now be out of date. See the current GOV.UK content and publishing guidance.
We've continued to make incremental improvements to the topical events format in the past couple of months. Here's a quick round-up of topical event-y stuff we've shipped in the relatively recent past.
About pages for topical events
Departments have created faux news articles for practically all our topical events so far, containing static information explaining the event. Examples:
It was never a good use of the news format, and we've now got around to building the ability to have an 'about' page per event. It will appear as a link (using text you specify) below the summary description of the event, as shown in the image above.
We'd love it if editors who are in charge of existing topical events could please recreate their existing 'about' content in this new format, and let us know when done so we can delete and redirect the news articles to the new about pages.
New design
The design has changed considerably, losing lots of white space and positioning the logo (for events that have one) in a less obtrusive place. We now have the ability to remove a logo after it is added, too.
We've also improved the layout of the featured documents and lists of related documents on the page, with links to the filtered document list to see all the documents related to the event.
We plan to roll similar changes out to standard topic pages at some point.
Shorter cache
As mentioned in passing the other day, the cache on topical events is now 5 minutes so featured content can be updated in a timely way.
Email alerts
Users can now sign up to email alerts from topical events.
Featuring
Topical events can now be featured on organisation homepages. This is important so that, for example, the Treasury can feature their spending round and budget events on the HM Treasury page.
Archival
Last but not least, topical events have an expiry date, after which time they cease to be listed on the topics index page but they can still be found by search, metadata links around the site or directly.
4 comments
Comment by Janette Lucey posted on
Will the ability to feature topical events be rolled out to world locations?
Comment by Neil Williams posted on
Hi Janette. There are no current plans for that, but if you can give an example of when it might be appropriate to do so I'd be happy to consider it.
Comment by Fran W posted on
Hello, if we think we have a topical event coming up do we raise a ticket outlining the user need to start discussions? Also, do we have to consider anything else - topical events aren't covered as yet in the deisgn/style guide. Thanks, F
Comment by Graham Francis posted on
Hi Fran - yes, please raise a ticket. You might also want to take a look at our guidelines around topical events in the following blogpost:
https://insidegovuk.blog.gov.uk/2013/05/03/topical-event-landing-pages/