We're a few days into the current sprint. Here's a summary of the improvements you can expect to the departments and policy section and the devolved government publisher.
- Bug squashing. We've dedicated half a day of each developer's time this sprint to blitzing known, minor bugs. We've been prioritising features over more minor bugs for a while and need to play catch-up, so we'll probably do this for every sprint from now until we've got them back in check.
- Multiple, ordered HTML versions with metadata. Ongoing from last sprint, we're working hard to deliver changes which make the HTML versions of publications have all of the features available to PDF and other file attachments.
- More big changes to document series. We're changing the name of this format to "collections" and making them work like other documents, so they will have workflow, fact checking, 2nd eyes, unpublishing with redirection, tagging to multiple organisations and topics and all that goodness.
- Featuring on topics. It's been a while since the topic pages had some attention, and analytics data shows that engagement with these pages could be better. We're adding featuring, so they serve returning users better and so users can immediately see what's important and current.
- Reinstating the "create detailed guide" link, with added user needs. We'll be turning the ability to create new detailed guides back on, and adding fields to it so that publishers have to specify the user need(s) the guide is intending to meet. We'll blog about the rationale and our current thinking about this format separately in a few days.
- Filtering by date range. The before/after date filter on the publications and announcements lists will be replaced with a date range. As well as being more useful, this will deal with the problem of users copying or bookmarking the filtered page URL and inadvertently including a date parameter.
- Implementing improvements to the change notes UI. The fields for specifying a minor/major change are moving to a more logical place and the consequence of this publishing choice will be made much clearer. (This work may carry on into next sprint).
- Investigating bringing problem reports into publisher. We're collecting incredibly valuable feedback from users via the "report a problem" links on the bottom of every page. We're going to look at how we might bring that data into publisher so editors can act on it.
We'll demo where we've got to on all this and more besides at the show and tell on Monday 30 Sept at 3.30pm. Representatives from orgs who are live on GOV.UK are extremely welcome, please shout in the comments or email Alice Newton if you want to come.
5 comments
Comment by David P posted on
Presuming you mean Monday 30 Sept? 3.30pm an unusual time - I'll ask around at work anyway.
Comment by Neil Williams posted on
Yes, 30th at 3.30pm. Hope to see someone from Defra there!
Comment by John Ploughman posted on
Looks like a busy sprint.
I'm having a problem viewing some stories on Pivotal at the moment - they just won't expand, and on hover they don't show any details.
'Support multiple, ordered HTML versions with metadata' is one example, but there are quite a few more. I've tried a couple of different browsers with the same result.
Any ideas?
Comment by Neil Williams posted on
Nope, afraid I can't help with that one. Pivotal are making a lot of changes at the moment, maybe check on their blog/customer forum and see if it's a known thing.
Comment by Graham Francis posted on
John - might be that you're not using the latest version of Flash? (that's been causing me problems).