Better landing page

[ebruchez]

Our current landing page is mainly designed to showcase Form Builder and demo forms.

But in practice, it is not easy to remove that page, and so some users just use the landing page as a start page to navigate to Form Builder, for example.

We should do better:

• Maybe just use the Form Runner Home page. In that case, that page should also point to Form Builder (it does not at this time), including the Summary and New pages.
• Also, maybe a way to remove the examples and make the Form Runner Home page the landing page.

[ebruchez]

Possible requirements for using the Form Runner "Home" page as landing page:

• page must be reasonably fast (see Form Runner Home page slow again on demo.orbeon.com #2269)
• must be able to sort or filter what it shows (properties or UI?), so that on demo.orbeon.com we can always show the Orbeon demo forms first
• link to Form Builder /new, but also links to Form Builder to see/edit existing forms (Form Runner home page to link to Form Builder #2159)

Q: Do we need to be able to associate an image with each form? Currently we have images, but they are not that great (no unity of style). Otherwise how could we make the look appealing?

[ebruchez]

+1 from evaluator to make it clearer what the XForms example do (if we keep them).

[ebruchez]

Suggesting the following:

• use Form Runner Home page
• Form Runner Home page to link to Form Builder Form Runner home page to link to Form Builder #2159
• show form descriptions
• Q: How to show the Orbeon demo forms first on demo.orbeon.com?
• Q: Do we want images at all?
  • A: I would say not needed at this point.

[ebruchez]

Another idea was to use tiles for a landing page. This could then be separate from /fr/. Possible tiles:

• "New Form" in form designer
• "Existing forms" in form designer
• Published forms
• Admin page

[ebruchez]

Since we decided to use Bootstrap 5 for the Landing page, we depend on #1670.

[ebruchez]

Discussing with @avernet, we are leaning towards accepting the idea to have a new landing page with Bootstrap 5 even if the rest of Orbeon Forms is not yet migrated to Bootstrap 5. This would be a new feature, and the current "landing" page is fairly different from the rest of the product already anyway. It wouldn't be a perfect path, but probably acceptable.

If that's the case, then we still need to decide:

• what minimum features we'd like
• what is configurable

And then of course implement it.

[ebruchez]

So then, what should we have on the landing page for a first version? Tentatively:

• Card 1: If user has access to any published forms: "Access all your published forms"
• Card 2: I user has Form Builder access: "View and edit your in-progress forms created with Form Builder"
  • Maybe with list of latest forms
  • Maybe with "New" link right there
• Card 3: Demo forms
  • can be configured to be removed

We also need away to reach the Admin page.

[ebruchez]

• check why Login dropdown don't work
• decide if we want /fr/ vs. /fr/landing, and also have a redirect
• handle LinkToLandingPageParam in param editor
• LinkToHomePageParam: backward compatibility: where should it link?
• add forms/admin => go to /forms
• landing page nav icon in navbar should optional

[ebruchez]

Considering MVP done, just missing doc.

[ebruchez]

If form-builder-permissions.xml contains a requirement that the user has a role, for example my-admin-role, and the user is currently not logged in or is logged in and has that role, what should happen?

Right now, the Landing page shows the link to the Admin page in this case still, but the Admin page:

• sets any-has-admin-permission to false
• which causes the page to look like the Forms page, without any buttons

The Landing page cannot know if any-has-admin-permission must be set to true or false because that requires accessing all the data right now, and the Landing page doesn't necessarily want to do that, and in the future there will be paging (#5493).

The solution is to make sure the current "Form Builder" permissions for the user allow at least one role, while for "New Form Builder Form", we also allow the link if there are no permission set in form-builder-permissions.xml.

[ebruchez]

• doc

[ebruchez]

• consider setting to disable landing page by configuration (maybe enter separate issue)

[ebruchez]

• update doc, which currently mentions the Home Page

[ebruchez]

+1 for doc

[ebruchez]

Documented