User homepage

Development RFCs
#1

Hi,
I’ve been working on a feature allowing users to set homepage they want, I have a working POC PR for the Foreman [0] and for the extension from plugin [1].

I would like to hear opinion from the community, specially about what pages we should we allow to set as a homepage.

Right now they are hardcoded to:

All hosts
Provisioning templates

What I would like to hear from you is:

  • Any ideas for pages that users might want to have as a homepage?
  • Should we have new setting for default home page, so admins can set something else than /?
  • Any comments to the feature, implementation ideas, risks …?

Links
[0] Foreman PR
[1] Plugin Extension
[2] Redmine issue

3 Likes
RFC: Customizable landing page after user login
#2

Nice!

I would recommend moving this of the Development category, since this question will be better answered by users than developers. Also I’d recommend writing a short blog post about it and mention this thread on the next community demo, since we want to hear from as many users as possible.

I would personally like to have ability to set the homepage to

  1. dashboard
  2. inventory (meaning the host index page)
1 Like
#3

It took me reading the PR to understand what you meant by homepage, but as I read it as “allow the user to configure the landing page after logging in”. Is that a correct reading?

#4

It took me reading the PR to understand what you meant by homepage, but as I read it as “allow the user to configure the landing page after logging in”. Is that a correct reading?

Yes

1 Like
#5

Would it make sense to hook into the menu? Make it possible to select anything from the navigation as a landing page. Some of them may not make sense, but we already have the code (plugins can hook into it, no need for a new registry) and it’ll be familiar to users.

A minor consideration may be when a plugin is removed (or a menu item) that a user may have set an invalid homepage. This can be dealt with by looking up the route: if it’s invalid, fall back to the default homepage.

1 Like
#6

I’ve been thinking about the same solution, would be easy and we don’t have to guess what users might like to have as landing page. I didn’t implemented it for the same reason you wrote: Some of them (pages) may not make sense.
But in general I like the idea, will think about it.

A minor consideration may be when a plugin is removed (or a menu item) that a user may have set an invalid homepage.

Good point, I’ll see what I can do with it.

1 Like
#7

As I user, I think this would be great feature. May I suggest, if possible, to allow the user to add any page, perhaps via a button (e.g. “Set as homepage”) simply available on any page the user is viewing. Not sure how feasible that is, or how it would handle 404.

#8

If we go with this approach, I’d like to have a manually almost handcrufted selected items we’d display for selection. Looking at the menu, we have over 70 items on an instance with couple of plugins. I can imagine only 5 of them being really useful. I’m sure there will be a user asking for the 6th option missed, but I’m sure adding that to the that list would take 5 minutes. I would like to avoid having a drop down of 70 items where only 5 are useful and used by 99% users.

Thinking about this more, if we implement a list like that, I’m not sure where the menu items would come into the play. Perhaps the benefit is the single definition place, so if the URL ever changes, we have it just one place.

#9

Sounds like an option we could add to the menu item registry, like allow_as_homepage (or similar) and defaulting to false. Menu::Item already has various options and it would be an easy extension point for plugins.

#10

Yeah, that would work for me. Let’s see what @lstejskal thinks about the implementation.

As @rgp says, It may be interesting to also be able to set the homepage to something that’s not menu (like particular host detail) or specific SCAP policy, but I guess that goes much further that the original proposal and could be added later. Having at least some option of customization would be great first step.

1 Like
#11

Thinking out loud: not exactly directly to a detail page, but I wonder if the ability to see a list page (host list) with a specific bookmark would get close. Though perhaps that would also be a good widget on the dashboard.

#12

Which got me thinking, isn’t this something people can easily do today with brower’s bookmarks support? It would certainly feel more integrated to the website, but it feels we’d reimplement this. I guess more user input here would help. So I’d recommend again to move this out of Development category and make some noise about that (demo, blog post)

1 Like
#13

That is a great point. Bookmarks are great. However if I remember correctly they don’t do great on foreman and katello if you are not logged in. You get redirected to the login form, but then not back to the address you were trying to reach. One example was /content_hosts, which after login would send you to /hosts.

I think there is still a place for choosing your landing page. For example, users with access to manage only one product with couple of repositories. Saving couple of clicks and sending them to their area from start.

1 Like
#14

So I’d recommend again to move this out of Development category and make some noise about that (demo, blog post)

I would love to but changing the category just doesn’t work. Maybe I’ll lock this post and create new one in correct category with summary of all comments and ideas I gathered so far

#15

I think I could change it, but perhaps opening a new thread will be best so it will generate new notifications for people watching that category.

#16

That sounds like a bug. Have you filed one?

#17

Which got me thinking, isn’t this something people can easily do today with brower’s bookmarks support?

@lstejskal, as Marek said, this can be achieved by bookmarks, so what does this change does that is better than bookmarks?

#18

Well, if you look that way it is kinda same behavior :smiley:
I don’t have strong opinion about this, looked to me like a good feature but if users won’t needed and prefer the bookmarks than we can scrap it

#19

Tried to replicate the redirect issue on foreman 3.2.1 + katello 4.4.1, but redirects work as expected. Must have been fixed in previous release. Was definitely issue on Satellite 6.8 (foreman 2.1.2 + katello 3.16)