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Published 20 hours ago • verified publisher icon guardian

"All today's stories" links

Open bryophyta opened this issue 2 years ago • 7 comments

The 'topics' bar at the bottom of fronts pages is made up of two parts.

  • The 5 most popular (non-section) keyword tags in the stories contained on that front (this is implemented in #7101)
  • Sometimes there is also an All today's stories link at the beginning of the list (highlighted below).
topics bar

Status quo for "All today's stories"

Generally speaking, for a tag or section page the allPath link should link to the non-editionalised front which displays all stories in that tag or section, e.g. All today's stories on the uk/lifeandstyle front will link to lifeandstyle/all.

The allPage URL is not defined in the CAPI or facia-press models, so Frontend uses a heuristic to find the relevant path.

Current heuristic for generating an 'allPath'

Roughly: if the page id matches the section id of at least one tag belonging to a curated story in that page, then remove the edition (if any) from the page id and add '/all' to the end of it.

e.g. uk/lifeandstyle -> lifeandstyle/all

This won't always yield a path. If it doesn't, then Frontend tries to find a path ending in '/all' in one of the treats on the front. (This is how the allPath for the /uk front gets determined.)

Issues/Questions

  • Is the allPath functionality in Frontend currently working as intended? (the /uk front's All today's stories link goes to tone/letters/all -- drawn from a treat on the front -- which is unlikely to be what users would expect).
  • More generally, what is the intended functionality for this link?
    • Worth noting that there don't appear to be tests for this functionality, and we haven't been able to find documentation of the original intention yet.
    • Navigation/discovery is a good aim, but from preliminary exploration it looks like these links get very little traffic (e.g. ~20 clicks per day on the UK front).
    • SEO has been mentioned a few times; do we know how to clarify its role in SEO?
  • UX may be looking into this in the near future, although no specific work is planned.
  • Do we need to migrate this over to DCR as part of the 1% test? If we're unsure, how can we find out the information needed to make a decision?

bryophyta avatar Feb 09 '23 14:02 bryophyta