How to Start a Portal

Key considerations:

• Depending on the project need, portals can be driven dynamically from Views or statically from Tables.

• External content that the portal renders within the site must be hyperlinked "https". Links out can be http or https.

• Removing facets can improve performance.

Jira

Portal development coordination is tracked in the Community Portals Jira project. Create an appropriate Epic to track the overall project. It is the job of the respective product manager to triage issues to the engineering team (Alina, Michael and Jay) appropriately.

What are the first steps?

1. Submit a 1-pager for product and design.

2. Open a Jira to task the design team with the creation of relevant wire frames. Designers will implement logo and color scheme.

3. A Synapse Project drives the backend of the portal. Make a project (e.g. PEC).

4. Define a url by opening a Jira issue with PORTALS (e.g. PEC). This creates an empty AWS bucket.

5. Implement design in the staging site by opening a Jira issue with PORTALS(e.g. PEC)

6. {TODO:determine what is required to make these connections} Create Table/View architecture

   1. Publications

      1. Set schema

      2. Tool to scrape Pubmed for relevant publications using grant or pubmed id as input

   2. People

      1. Set schema

   3. Study

      1. Set schema - note "hint text" is tracked in Confluence page and must be manually set by web developer

   4. General notes about table schemas and column types

      1. Simple markdown (links, bullets, bold, etc) is supported in underlying tables, but you will need to specify which columns have markdown in the schema

      2. if you need to link to multiple synapse IDs, separate the list with commas

Setting Views and Tables

If you set a facet in a Table or File View, it will be displayed in the portal. It will also come at a cost - the more facets, the slower the performance.

Portals can be driven off of both Views and Tables. Key considerations when determining which to choose:

• By design, Tables are not public. Therefore, Portal Tables must be explicitly whitelisted by governance and someone on the leadership team in order to make them public. This is required any time the schema changes or values are added.

• Files are only available to bulk download through Views. (Bulk download feature not exposed in the web UI in Tables).

• There is potentially a performance hit in Views (in dispute; has not been fully tested) if there are varying access permissions across the set of files and many facets.

Use these questions to guide conversation with the design team about the homepage:

1. Why/goals/value- what is the focus of this portal

2. Relationship to consortium

3. Fit in ecosystem

4. Type of resources available

5. Diversity within type/amount within type

6. Main actions- e.g. find data/tools/people

7. Progress and future-- living repo/freshness of data

8. FAQ/help