Inside Inside Government

A quick Pivotal tip

We’re in the habit of sharing links to tickets in our public Pivotal Tracker project to let people see how we’ve translated their request into a user story, and so they can track where it is in the backlog.

Pivotal’s interface is not exactly intuitive, so here’s a quick tip on how to see where the story is in the queue.

When you click the link to a ticket, you’ll get a full screen view like this:

To see where the ticket is in relation to all the others, look in the top right corner and click the diagonal arrow circled here:

This will minimise the ticket but keep it open so you can see where it is, like this (you might have to scroll to find it):

Stories in green are done. They show in the ‘Backlog’ and ‘Done’ lists.

Stories in yellow are being worked on currently. They show in the ‘Current’ list.

Stories in grey are queued to be worked on next/soon. They show in the ‘Current’ list (this sprint) and ‘Backlog’ list (next few sprints). The team works through them in order.

Stories in blue are pending. They show in the ‘Icebox’ list. I’ve grouped them into approximate priority groups (P1 = high, P3 = low), but they are not necessarily prioritised within those groupings. You’re welcome to raise a support request via https://www.gov.uk/support/internal if you want to dispute the priority of a story you care about, but please do take a look at all the other tickets above it so you have a sense of the relative priorities overall.

Posted 3 weeks ago

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publisher tips, other stuff,

A change to the ‘relevant to local gov’ checkbox

You no longer need to check a box on documents to specify whether they are relevant to local government (contrary to what we said in previous posts).

This relevance is now being inferred from the association to policies. All you need do is tag your news, speeches, publications and consultations to the relevant policy and the rest will follow automatically.

The only place that checkbox now exists is on policies, and DCLG will be setting it for all policies so other departments should just not touch it.

new features, publisher tips,

…And a side order of social media policy

Organisations can now add a corporate information page to explain their approach to using social media. This is so, for example, they can link from their Twitter bio to a page explaining how they will and won’t engage. Some clever young civil servant once suggested this was a good idea.

Here’s the admin interface:

The resulting link shows up in the small print at the bottom of an org page. (Needs a bit of iteration, but it does for now):

Use it or don’t use it, it’s entirely up to you.

You can use it to explain your approach to all your social channels or just the one.

If you plan to cover moderation policies for existing blogs within this page, note that this will end up moving to the GOV.UK blogs platform when your content moves across, rather than to this corporate info page (with appropriate links between the two).

All the social media icons you can eat…

For the first five months of Inside Gov’s young life, organisations have only been able to feature 5 links to the social web in the “follow us” section of their respective homepages.

They were able to link to one account each on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and Flickr, with a 5th slot for linking out to a blog.

Here’s one FCO made earlier:

That’s all changed, now, with the introduction of more flexibility than you can shake a stick at.

Organisations can now add an unlimited number of these ‘follow us’ links, specifying the link text and selecting the appropriate icon to display from the following list of (mostly!) popular services:

Twitter
Facebook
Flickr
YouTube
LinkedIn
Google+
Foursquare
Pinterest
Email (for linking to service alerts not provided by Inside Gov)
Blog/other (this displays a generic speech bubble icon)

The frontend displays the first 5 links, with a ‘+ others’ link to reveal the rest. Here’s one DSA made earlier:

Which expands when you click the + others link to look like this:

So there you go, knock yourself out. We welcome your feedback, as ever, and will keep looking at the evidence of how users are interacting with these links and share anything we learn.

Removing content - back to draft or to the eternal void?

Liz Hitchcock in the Inside Government content team has asked us to update you on the process for removing content from the frontend…

To have content unpublished or deleted send your request via https://www.gov.uk/support/internal.

When you submit a request, please specify whether you are requesting something is unpublished or deleted:

Unpublishing reverts the document to draft state, and you can then edit and re-publish it at the same URL

Deleting sends the page to the eternal void, but you need to specify a redirect that duplicates or supersedes it

In the case of deletion, can you also specify:

the replacement GOV.UK URL
whether this is a duplicate or superseding content
whether you want the redirect to be automatic or via a screen that explains the content has been replaced and the reason (not editable, this is a pre-worded)

The post-redirect screen looks like:

The post-deletion screen looks like:

We’ll aim to action the request within a [working] day.

Needless to say permanently ‘disappearing’ stuff that’s been published doesn’t win any friends with users. So although we can do it for you, we’d rather not do it all.

Embedding contact information (like press office contacts) directly into pages

This afternoon we will ship a new feature to enable publishers to inject contact information into any page using a simple markdown command.

You should use this feature instead of adding the contact info as text on the page, so that contacts are re-usable across the site and (later) downloadable as vCard format and available to third parties through the API.

Here’s how it will work:

Managing your contacts

Contacts at your organisation can be managed under the ‘contacts’ tab in the admin interface for your organisation. Here you can add, edit and delete your organisation’s contacts.

Currently all contacts added here get listed on your organisation’s homepage. We will add a feature soon to give you control over which ones are shown.

Adding a contact to a page

Next to each contact, you will now see a note of the “markdown to use”. Here’s one I made earlier. Note the “[Contact: nnn]” markdown.

Copy that text to your clipboard, including the square brackets, and then paste it into the body field of the page where you want to insert it.

The formatting guidance on the right hand side of the edit screen also includes the instruction, like this:

Having done so, the contact information will be displayed to end users.

Use encouraged for press releases!

The driver for building this feature right now was the need to provide press office contact information to media.

So for that reason, if you create a press release with no contact information embedded you’ll see a gentle reminder message, which looks like this:

Soon, we will also provide a way to aggregate an organisation’s media contacts in a single place so that we can provide a better way of giving this information to journalists than using publications, which departments have been doing as an interim measure.

No format for that? Talk to us!

All too often, we’re seeing examples of publishers in departments hijacking content formats to publish material that it would be better to model explicitly as a thing in its own right.

Here are a few of examples where it would have been great if the publishers had flagged to us that there wasn’t a suitable format or functionality, rather than shoe-horning it into a format designed to do something else.

Using the publications format to publish directions to office buildings like these two examples: How to find 22 Whitehall and How to find Abercrombie House
Using the publications format to advertise overseas jobs like this one
Using news articles to fake blog posts instead of using your perfectly serviceable blogging platform
Putting foreign language content into formats which don’t currently support translations like this detailed guide

So please, please tell us about new or as-yet-unmet needs using the (government-only) support form. It may well be that we agree you should temporarily use an existing format if your need is urgent, but at the very least we need to know you’ve had to do that so we can plan to meet the need in a better way.

Here is a list of the vanity URLs we have created to date.

publisher tips,

Short URLs for organisations’ profile pages

Any organisations moving to GOV.UK which previously had a corporate website at their own domain will get a short URL (or ‘vanity URL’) at the root of GOV.UK which they can use to promote their new home on the web.

These take the form of the organisation’s initials, for organisations that refer to themselves in that way, for example www.gov.uk/dft and www.gov.uk/defra, or the shortest possible form of words for those that don’t.

(Note that although some organisations’ domains previously used words, for instance culture.gov.uk and justice.gov.uk, for consistency all short URLs on GOV.UK will use initials where possible.)

Please don’t write “statistical press release” in titles

Some publishers are titling their press releases about newly published statistics with the phrase “Statistical press release” or similar phrases.

Here’s one from this morning:

And here’s a load more

As we’ve said on this blog before, duplicating format labels in title fields is bad form and results in this kind of thing appearing in email alerts and feed readers:

“Press release: Statistical press notice: NHS 111….”

So please don’t do it.

We suggest a better way of approaching this is to title it “Latest statistics about NHS 111…”

We don’t think it’s justified to have a distinct sub-type of press release just for press releases about statistics on the announcements index. Let us know if you disagree strongly.

It’s also questionable whether you need to issue a press release about the statistics at all, rather than merely featuring the actual stats publications themselves on your organisation’s homepage.

Here’s an example of how it’s looking now.

publisher tips,

Iterating HTML publications

Here are a few small changes we’ve made to the HTML publications format since it was first added:

we’re now using Transport rather than Helvetica as the typeface, and have applied standard GOV.UK gutters and page dimensions
headings are now bold
we’ve improved the alignment of the header area
we fixed a bug which was requiring HTML pubs to be published twice before they would appear
the document title is now in the page meta title
apostrophes in titles render correctly
we are able to import them in bulk from incoming websites

There’s lots more to do, and we’ll continue iterating. Search for “html pubs” in the product backlog to see the stuff we’re planning.

Details, details

Here’s a ist of smaller changes we’ve introduced recently that you may want to be aware of:

If a user selects a document from the filtered lists of announcements, policies or publications then clicks the browser’s back button, the user’s filter settings are now remembered.
We’ve introduced a new sub-type of organisation called “Executive office”. This is how we will categorise No 10 and the DPM’s office which are due to join us at the end of the month.
Organisation pages now only show the first five ‘mainstream’ quick links in the top right corner of the page.
We fixed a bug which was causing policies to lose their association with policy advisory groups and policy teams. All previous associations have also been restored. Example here.
The news sub-type formerly known as ‘rebuttal’ is now called ‘government response’. It’s intended as the government’s right to reply to news coverage, and is used by some departments more than others. Demand by end users has, not surprisingly, been low. We’ll be keeping an eye on this and iterating accordingly.
We fixed a nasty IE7 bug that was making the navigation disappear