Digital

What we’ve been working on: Friday 15th May Product Demo

May 15, 2015 by Jono Ellis No Comments | Category Digital Public Services, mygov.scot

This is a post by Jono Ellis, our Social Media Manager

Mark demoing the bulk editor

Mark demoing the bulk editor

Every second Friday the team comes together for a product demo, giving us an opportunity to sit down and talk about what’s in the latest release.

Here is what we covered this week:

Improving content states

As the needs of our content team have matured we have adapted and improved the publishing system. The changes being demoed today included a enhancement to the states for content items. Content items could previously be either unpublished or published – now content moves through a workflow with a series of states. These are authoring, awaiting peer-review, peer-review, awaiting fact-checking, fact-checking, ready for publishing, published, unpublished.

These new content states tie in with roles that people pick up and improve the publishing tool to fit in with our existing process.

Improvement in our analysis capabilities

Our newest member of the team Dan took the helm of Google Analytics and talked through off our recent growth and traffic sources. This included how traffic from search has changed during the decommissioning of DirectScot. Users initially arrived at www.mygov.scot through redirected URLs, but this changed to direct traffic as search engines begun swapping out old pages and serving the new pages on www.mygov.scot.

A warm welcome to Dan!

Ability to edit live content & push button site publish

Until now the site publishes content twice daily, but there was a need to be able to do more here – firstly to edit pages without having to un-publish them and secondly for the content team to be able to manually publish pages on demand. We tackled both of these in this release.

Introducing bulk editing

Recent changes to content items highlighted the need to be able to quickly edit the same section of many pages in one go. So, we built a bulk edit tool! The bulk editing tool pulls in the meta data from our content items (e.g. title, description, slug) and allows bulk editing of each field. This will vastly improve the time it takes to make a systematic change to the same meta data across the site. The tool allows you to filter and reorder columns and all edits are auto-saved.

Improving site-search

We make use of Elastic Search for site-search. It has a bunch of great features and we’ve been working on assessing, building, styling and testing new features for this release. Tim, our software engineer, showed us; search results appearing as you type, “did you mean?” suggestions for misspellings and highlighting search terms within the search results. These features were not available straight out of the box so it’s been great to see the search tool be improved upon.

Did you mean…

Thank you to everyone who attended and contributed to the demos today.

We’ll be sharing updates on these features, and much more on social, so follow the team via @mygovscot on Twitter for more updates. Want to comment? Let us know below!

Tags: Product

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