2022.Q3
The 2022.Q3 release for DIAL’s flagship product is now live! We’ve added brand new features, fixed some bugs, and made technical improvements to the Catalog of Digital Solutions.
If you want to learn more about the platform, feel free to use the left navigation bar to browse our Catalog wiki.
Featured updates
Dialog/Commenting features have been improved. We want to make it easier for our community to interact, ask questions, and share best practices. The feature is now more streamlined so that when users make comments, admins are notified and conversations can continue. This feature will strongly contribute to the community building that we’re doing around the Catalog.
Search Engine Optimization and tracking improvements to the Catalog have been added. This effort aims to make our website more visible and drive traffic to the platform. The Catalog is now more professionally presented in the search results with a clean description and image.
Inclusion of Commercial Tools - many users have indicated that it would be useful to view commercial tools through the lens of the SDG Digital Investment Framework. We are launching the addition of 40 commercial tools used in agriculture and will be testing their inclusion under the framework.
Data Improvements
Category | Improvement | Description | |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Tags | Adding relevant tags | New tags (including those relevant for agriculture) have been added to the Catalog to make searching for relevant products and data easier. |
| 2 | Sectors | Updated | Sector lists have been updated |
| 3 | Countries | Updated | Countries list has been updated to remove erroneous ones and to be consistent with list of UN member countries. |
| 4 | Organizations | Improved organizations pages | The following organization pages were improved for more descriptive content: IFAS, FAO, AgriHub, IFPRI, Kean University Cybersecurity Center, USAID. R4D, Local Development Research Institute |
| 5 | Projects | Improved projects pages | The following project pages were improved for more descriptive content: 50x2030, Catalyzing data-driven solutions for smallholder farmer fertilizer uptake, Africa Data Observatory (Statistics.Africa), Food & Nutirition Early Warning Mechanism, Village Based Advisory: ZydiPlus |
| 6 | Products | Improved product pages | The following product pages were improved for more descriptive content: AfricaRISING Dataverse, Mazao Plus+, |
| 7 | Glossary | Migration | The OSC Hub Glossary & Definitions has been migrated to the Catalog’s wiki |
| 8 | Playbook | Author information | The author of playbooks is now displayed in the playbook. Previously, this information was being collected but not being displayed. |
| 9 | Commercial Ag Products Data | New addition | 40+ Commercial Ag tools have been added to the repository labeled as “commercial” |
Technical Improvements
Category | Improvement | Description | |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Edit forms | Secure edit forms | The following edit forms now have checks on the front end, to allow only users with permissions (i.e. admin or content owner) to edit, otherwise to display that the user is unauthorized:
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| 2 | Use Cases | Create/edit forms | Create/edit functionality has been created for use case details on the back end and the front end to be able to: create new and edit with a new and easier form, assign use case type, and use case content, map to SDG targets, edit tags, edit workflows, and edit products on each use case page, assign building blocks in the use case step pages |
| 3 | Building Blocks | Create/edit forms | Create/edit functionality has been created for building blocks to: create new and edit with a new and easier form, to assign or edit products, and to assign or edit workflows, |
| 4 | Organization | Edit offices | Admins and org owners can now see an offices section on the organization page and can assign or add geocoded office locations |
| 5 | Workflows | Create/edit forms | Create/edit functionality has been created for workflows on the backend and frontend to be able to: create/update workflow content, assign/edit building blocks |
| 6 | Tags | Create/edit functionality | Create/edit functionality has been created for tags on the backend and frontend: to display a tag card for editing, update admin menu to show tags, display a create/edit pop-up, and add buttons to create and edit tags. |
| 7 | Shared components | Refactoring existing forms and pages | Existing forms and pages have been refactored to use new standard input components for the following forms: playbooks, repository, Wizard, filters, user edit forms, play forms, candidate organization, candidate product. |
| 8 | User Security | Improved user permissions | There is now an easier way to create and manage users and permissions for admin users. If a user does not have permissions to enter the user form, an error message is displayed “You are not authorized to view this page” |
| 9 | Error Display | 500 error | A 500 error page has now been added. |
| 10 | UX | Datasets tab | Improvements of “open datasets” UX, |
| 11 | Configuration | Updated | Linter configuration updated to avoid common issues found during code reviews. |
| 12 | Home Page | Improve load times | A plugin now renders the YouTube facade until the introductory video is loaded to improve the load time of the home page. |
| 13 | Images | Optimization | Image assets have been converted to next/image for optimization, particularly on the home page. |
| 14 | Sectors | Create/edit functionality | Create/edit functionality has been created for workflows on the backend and frontend to be able to: return list of sectors, add, edit & delete sectors. |
| 15 | SEO | Configuration | SEO for global meta tags and metadata has been configured. |
| 16 | Software Maintenance | Updates | Updated next.js library to current version. |
| 17 | Permissions | Sensitive data | Any information with sensitive data (such as email addresses) is viewable only by those with appropriate permissions. |
| 18 | Product | Height of cards | The height of the cards have been made taller for optimal UX. |
| 19 | Maturity Rubric | Addition of machine-readable information | Technical improvements have been made to read maturity information from GitHub. Rubric categories and indicators have been created. (*Note: the full functionality will be released in Q4) |
| 20 | Commercial Tools | Functionality | Functionality to store, display, and filter for commercial tools has been added |
Bug Fixes
Category | Improvement | Description | |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | User Emails | Confirmation Emails | Confirmation emails are now being sent to users when signing up for an account. |
| 2 | Open Datasets | Multiple display | An error which was rendering mapped SDGs 8 times on open dataset entries has been fixed |
| 3 | Open Datasets | URL Visualization | Now fixed: Some of the data visualizations were not rendering properly, due to an error of how the web address was linking. |
| 4 | Building blocks | Dependency on workflows | Now fixed: In the use case steps, the Building Blocks section was returning results dependent to the workflows. |
| 5 | Wizard | Candidate products | Now fixed: here was an error loading candidate products in the Recommendations Wizard reading “error fetching data” when there was a sector and sub-sector selected on the first page of the wizard. |
| 6 | Cards | Sizes | Text overlap on some of the cards has been fixed by scaling the card and truncating the text if there are over 50 characters. The whole text is visible through a tooltip on hover. |
| 7 | Organization pages | Sector selection working | Now fixed: On organization pages, when selecting a single sector, multiple sectors were rendering on display. |
| 8 | UX | Button treatment for “create new' | “Create new” buttons used to be displayed with a simple hyperlink, but was difficult for users to spot. It has been highlighted with a new button treatment, consistent with brand guidelines |
| 9 | Search | Organization by Alias | Now fixed: ability to find organizations by their aliases. |
| 10 | Playbooks | Display error for logged in user | Logged in users were still seeing “sign up or login to create playbooks” |
| 11 | Projects | Display error | Now fixed: in the project cards, the organization names was also rendering the sector names in the incorrect section. |
| 12 | Open Data | Tags | Now fixed: open data cards with no tags were displaying an empty square instead of the message “there are no tags mapped to this open dataset” |
| 13 | User Form | Placeholder text | The placeholder test on user form or organizations and products was inaccurate and has been fixed |
| 14 | Production logs | Errors | Errors in production logs have been fixed. |
| 15 | Organizations | Hyperlink placement | Office cards in the organizations page was displaying a dead hyperlink which has now been removed. |
| 16 | Candidate entry forms | Products and Organizations | Now fixed: Candidate forms for products and organizations were too wide, didn’t have breadcrumbs, and had incorrect validation mode. |
| 17 | Logos | Supported formats | There are now updated instructions for user awareness on which formats are supported in the logo upload. |
| 18 | SDGs | 404 Error | There was a 404 error being displayed when clicking on an SDG target in the use case page. This is now redirected to the appropriate SDG page. |
| 19 | Workflows | Images | Images for icons were not displaying but have now been fixed. |
| 20 | Project | Submission failure | Candidate project submissions were failing when a user clicked on a non-required field and didn’t edit. This has now been fixed. |
Important Resources
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