2022.Q4

We ended last year strong and the 2022.Q4 release for DIAL’s Catalog of Digital Solutions is now live! Our team is super excited for what we have in store for 2023 - stay connected by following our roadmap and signing up for the Catalog newsletter.

Featured Updates

  • Guided product tour - a much requested feature has been added to the Catalog! A guided product walkthrough of the platform is now available for first-time users to help onboard new users, introduce them to the key features and help them get started using it. Many users have requested that they would like to explore the platform independently without relying on lengthy demos or how-to videos, and the product tour is the short and quick helping hand that they may need.

  • Evaluation rubric - the product evaluation rubric is changing and this quarter we have introduced brand new automated indicators that can help users understand the qualities and merits of individual products

  • Playbooks - many new features and updates have been added to the playbooks feature to help users share their how-to guides and best practices in a seamless and intuitive manner. A playbook on Public Procurement of Technology has also been released. It provides a customized framework on best practices and tools to procure digital goods and services, within the framework of national procurement policies and procedures. The guide outlines 14 steps, across four phases, that governments in low resource countries can follow when procuring digital goods and services.

Data improvements

 

Category

Improvement

Ticket History

 

Category

Improvement

Ticket History

2

Commercial tools

Added entries on commercial/proprietary tools into the Catalog

https://solutions-catalog.atlassian.net/browse/CDS-741

3

Miscellaneous additions

  • Simplified the list of sectors for more intuitive search and filter.

  • Approved several candidate products nominated by users

  • Use cases can now have datasets associated with them and can be saved as a draft.

https://solutions-catalog.atlassian.net/browse/CDS-1099 https://solutions-catalog.atlassian.net/browse/CDS-400
Technical improvements

 

Category

Improvement

Ticket history

 

Category

Improvement

Ticket history

1

Evaluation rubric

An improved product evaluation rubric was implemented in the following ways:

  • Refined and expanded metrics that are being sourced from GitHub

  • An updated table structure to include existing and new maturity information

  • Language and frameworks that a product is written in is available as a visualization on the product page

  • Functionality includes being able to edit rubric categories on the front end.

  • Added radar visualizations for products automatically rated on more than 3 categories and replace with bar chart for products rated on less than 2 categories.

  • Added structure to allow manual reporting of maturity information

  • Created indicators for “code review” category

  • Metrics have been evaluated and scales and weights have been adjusted

  • The overall category scores are stored in products table and a nightly update sync has been added.

  • Added descriptions and explanations in maturity detail panel

2

Playbooks

The following playbooks enhancements and fixes were completed:

  • Plays were getting duplicated and when the user was submitting them. When deleting the duplicate, both plays were getting deleted.

  • Steps were not displaying content that had previously been entered.

  • Steps were not staying in the assigned order the user was putting them in

  • When assigning plays, user was not able to see a complete list of existing plays. The display was reading “loading more data” but subsequent pages were not loading.

  • New play order assigned by user was not saving correctly

  • Changing the order of moves wasn’t saving correctly for users.

  • Playbook tags text was overflowing on the card.

  • Plays were getting automatically deleted during the autosave

  • Draft playbooks were still viewable by unauthorized users with a direct link

  • Preview of text in plays was not displaying correctly.

  • Images were not uploading correctly

  • Playbooks authors were not being displayed

  • Added delete functionality for playbooks

  • Automatic spellcheck has been added

  • Building blocks and products can be assigned to plays

  • List of tags are displayed on playbooks page

3

Search Engine Optimization

The following updates were made to the SEO:

  • Installed and configured SEO package

  • New lighthouse report has been generated to compare to baseline runs. Details here:

  • Added metadata to select pages for easier search

  •  

4

Dialog/Commenting

The commenting and dialog features on the platform have been improved to include the following:

  • When a user replies to a commenter, the original commenter is notified of the reply through email.

  • When new comments are made, admins are notified via email so they can track/monitor/respond to community comments. User that was replied to also receives an email

  • User can now add a comment or reply to an existing comment

  • Discourse ID has been removed from from products, building blocks pages

  • Administrators and comment authors can delete comments

  • Detail pages now have comment sections

  • New database tables and fields to store comments hs been created

  • New plugins were installed

5

Maintenance & Optimization

  • Conversion of static pages to use SSG

  • Added a 500 page to the platform

  • Refactored GraphQL mutations

  • Updated linter configuration

  • Rendering YouTube facade until video content is ready

  • Images use next/image

  • Refactored code for consistent GraphQL mutations

  • Existing forms refactored to use new standard input components

  • Added new sitemap

  • Linting rules have been enabled and associated code issues fixed.

  • Warning on docker building process has been fixed.

  • Added a component to make sure that all Catalog pages render the same width.

  • Cleaned website data from protocol

6

Security

Edit forms have been secured and fixed

 

7

Create & Edit

The following functionality for creating & editing content has been added:

  • Editable section for building blocks in use case step edit form

  • “Offices” section for organizations is now editable

  • Create/edit functionality for tags, countries, sectors, building blocks, workflow, and use cases has been added

8

Recommendations Wizard

  • Results now display if a product is open source or commercial

  • Due to simplified sector division, the sub-sector dropdown has been replaced with use cases.

  • Playbooks have been added to the Wizard

  • Open data has been added to the Wizard

  • All building blocks are now viewable in the Wizard

  • Users can select more than one sector and more than one SDG

9

Miscellaneous

  • Google Analytics has been updated for website

  • Logos can now be added to open dataset entries

  • Created YAML files linking Building Blocks to GitHub repo and Jira project

Bug Fixes

 

Category

Description

Tracking

 

Category

Description

Tracking

1

Recommendations Wizard

  • Candidate products section on the wizard results was displaying “error fetching data”

  • Additional resources were not displaying correctly

  • Error fetching data if no selections are made

2

Organizations

  • Duplication error for organizations cards now resolved.

  • Organization office cards were being highlighted upon hover, indicating that they were clickable. The link effect has now been removed

3

Dialog/Commenting

  • User can now respond to or edit existing comment

  • Comments components' styles were broken

4

Candidate forms

Candidate forms had several bugs (now fixed) including that were too wide, lacked breadcrumbs, and had incorrect validation modes.

5

Privacy

Access has been limited to GraphQL with email addresses.

6

Logo upload

Compatible formats for logos have now been displayed in the submission forms so that users know which formats are supported on the platform.

7

Content association

In each use case step, the building blocks sections were returning results based on the mapped workflows. This has been changed to reflect the direct mapping of use cases to relevant building blocks.

8

Open dataset cards

Now fixed: Text was getting cropped and displaying incorrectly.

9

Maintenance

  • Snapshot tests were failing due to ongoing animation of dialog component

10

Filter error

The filter for “Covid-19 tools” was not deselecting when the user unclicked the filter, thus erroneously continuing to display only COVID-19 tools.

11

User Interface

Organization detail pages are now displaying spacing consistent with design.

12

Report issue

Help > Report Issue was redirecting user to another page which was not linked. There is now a dialog for reporting the issue.

13

User menu

  • Error was not allowing user to navigate to “My Profile” or “Sign Out” functions.

  • Error preventing users from applying as product or org owner

14

Open data

It is now possible to assign a country to the open data entries.

15

Error

  • Datasets spreadsheet had a bug causing an “application error: a client side exception has occurred”

  • 500 Error on maps page has been resolved.

  • 404 Error on Projects tab

  • 404 Error on SDGs tab

16

Text field

Copy and paste functionality into text forms for playbooks was not working.

17

Maps

Markers/Pins on the maps are now different depending on if an organization is a Digital Principles' endorser or not.

18

DIAL Logo

DIAL’s new logo has been added throughout the website to be consistent with branding changes.

19

Links to websites and repositories

  • Admin users trying to approve or decline candidate products were seeing broken links due to parsing error in the url which was removing the “:”

  • Read_repository_file_list does not work for certain repositories since an additional “/” was being added in the url

20

Dates

All dates in the platform (such as endorsement dates) were off by one date due to the default time being stored at 00:00:00 time UTC. All times have been changed to 12:00:00 UTC to fix this error.

21

Sign in & Authentication

  • Sign in URL infinity callback and auth pages were still visible if user was logged in

  • When 2 users were accessing the same instance of the catalog using the same user account (ie. both logged into the dev server using the admin account), the first user’s auth token was invalid which causes unpredictable behavior

  • Some new users were getting the error “username has already been taken”

22

Projects

Filtering by projects does not work

23

Products

Duplicate languages in product’s top languages visualization fixed