Here is a list of smaller features we've shipped in the past month or so which government publishers will want to know about.
Support for unique logos. Organisations which have been granted exemption from the single government identity system can now have their logos on their GOV.UK organisation page, like this one. Please do not add these yourself. GDS designers are working through the list and sizing and adding the images for you.
Support for exemption. Some organisations are exempt from the Freedom of Information Act. We've added the ability to turn off the block of instructions at the foot of organisation pages selectively for these orgs,replacing it with an explicit statement of the organisation's exemption like this one. Please don't edit this yourselves, ask us to do so via comments on this post or using the support form.
Filtering by date range. On the public site, users used to only be able to filter documents before or after a given date. Now they can specify a range, and narrow their results much more effectively. Many users had been in touch with us to request this.
Linking to off-site publications. We've added the ability to signpost from a publication page to an external site, much as we already do with consultations. This should be used rarely, but has been added so that publications which have good reason to exist off-platform can have a 'start' page on GOV.UK. For example we'll be using this to help GOV.UK users find Departmental Business Plans.
Filtering the documents list in publisher is lots easier. We've made a bunch of changes to the filter options in publisher, including changing the default filters to something more sensible, fixing some bugs where some selectors cancelled out others, and adding a "reset all fields" option among other things. And the list of documents now states their main format, not just their subtype.
Consistent presentation of inline contacts. There are two ways of adding contacts to a page. The first is to enter the contact information as text and style it with a markdown command. The second is to create the contact as a unique contact item and then embed it into the markdown using our nifty contact lookup. Previously the two methods would create very different-looking results. Now it looks the same, whichever way you choose. We'd much rather you use the second method, so the information is managed in one place. We will eventually phase out the first.
Previewing draft consultations now includes everything. It used to miss out some stuff, and now it doesn't.
Speeches can be backdated. For a long time, it was not possible to manually add an old speech and set the date to a date in the past like you can on most other formats. Now you can.
Speech metadata is clearer. We used to inject information about the location and type of speech (eg whether it's a verbatim transcript or just speaking notes) at the end of the summary. It was a bit lost there and sometimes read strangely. Now we're showing this in the metadata block beneath the speech's title.
More attachment types. Because of some niche but important user needs for these things, we have whitelisted attachments ending in .dot .eps .ps .xsd .xlt .xlsm and .dxf at departments' request.
Users are warned not to tell us their secrets. When reporting a problem using the link at the bottom of any page, users are now reminded it's not a good idea to give us their personal data via that form.
Clearer people and role pages. We've reverted a change to people and roles so that they no longer say "People" and "Role" as a heading, because it felt a bit cold and clinical. We also now clearly state when a role has become unoccupied (but we've got some iterating to do on that so there's a link to any successor roles).
Add multiple user needs for a guide without saving. In our first iteration of the interface for logging the user needs that a detailed guide exists to meet, you had to save the guide to add an additional user need. Now you can add all of the relevant needs in one go.
Don't forget, if you want to keep tabs on what we're building you can always look at our public development backlog here or (strictly for the fans) read the development team's commit messages on GitHub. Easier still, come to the fortnightly show and tell on a Monday afternoon. The next one is this coming Monday. See Alice's post for what to expect this time and how to tell us you're coming.
