The microsites project team are about to pause over the rest of August for a bit of a summer break for some but also another opportunity to perform some user testing on the functionality built so far. We’re now at a point where we expect council colleagues to be able to configure and populate a new microsite with pages, directories, events and news as well as tweak the look and feel with enough flexibility to make sites that look reasonably different from each other.
The proof will be in the pudding, so Maria and Richard have lined up a number of test users to spend some time building out an example site to see how easy it is and find out what is missing or broken.
The last sprint was largely pulling together the remaining bits of functionality, reviewing pull requests and fixing bugs in preparation for the user testing.
Group invite
To add a user to a microsite, the ‘microsite controller’ has to create the Drupal user account, add the user as a member of the microsite, then tell the user how / where to log in. A neat little module https://www.drupal.org/project/ginvite helps with this.
Once installed, we now have an ‘invitations’ tab on the group configuration page. This means a ‘microsite controller’ can invite new users with their email address, they can then sign up and accept the invitation to manage the microsite group.
The ability to invite a single user and select the desired role vs inviting multiple users at once without being able to select a role introduces some differences in the user experience of receiving invitations, so we will need to test the wording of the emails sent and make sure the language and the process is clear.
This also allows a ‘microsite admin’ user to invite other ‘microsite editor’ users from within the microsite. A neat solution from the Drupal contrib community. Thanks people!
Taxonomy terms
We’re still running on Group 1.x at the moment, rather than the 2.x or 3.x that we would like to be on soon. This means that configuration entities like vocabularies are not specific to a group (microsite). The terms within a vocabulary are content entities and are owned by a group (microsite). We worried that this might be problematic, but our council colleagues in the Microsites Working Group seemed to be OK with the idea that they would have the same vocabularies across all microsites on a given system.
We'll be able to confirm this in the upcoming user testing.
