Design and Web team summary – 22 November 2019

This was a fairly busy two weeks for the Web & design team at Canonical.  Here are some of the highlights of our completed work.

Web squad

Web is the squad that develop and maintain most of the brochure websites across the Canonical.

Takeovers and engage pages

This iteration we built two webinars with engage pages.

Lessons learned from 100+ private cloud builds webinar

Linux security with Ubuntu webinar

Server guide

The server team have ported the server guide content from help.ubuntu.com to the Ubuntu discourse. This gave us the ability to render the guides on ubuntu.com. And, this is what we have done.

We pull the content from discourse and render the post as HTML for easy reading. The server guide is now live at ubuntu.com/server/docs. 

Base

Base is the team that underpins our toolsets and architure of our projects. The team maintains the CI and deployment of all websites we maintain. 

Standard Python tests

We standardised the structure for our Python tests across our many codebases, using unittest and Flask’s test client.

We also made sure every project’s README has a CodeCov badge, alongside the CircleCI one.

Investigate GitHub actions

As GitHub Actions have now reached a certain level of maturity, we’ve been looking into whether we could make more use of Actions in our projects. More info soon.

Templates for deployment configs

Our Kubernetes config repository is currently very repetitive, as most services deliberately require very similar configuration.

We’ve been looking into whether we can use templating systems to reduce this duplication and make it clearer what the specific settings are for individual domains, and hope to merge our changes soon.

JAAS

The JAAS squad develops the UI for the JAAS store and Juju GUI  projects.

Sprint in Vancouver

During the sprint in Vancouver the team presented the work on the new JAAS dashboard to the company and kept moving forward the implementation on the JAAS dashboard project.

The team also continued working on Juju project website, and presented the work to align the consumption and publishing CLI commands of Juju, Snap, Charm and Snapcraft. CharmHub wise, the team explored new solutions and messages for the home page.

Vanilla

The Vanilla squad design and maintain the design system and Vanilla framework library. They ensure a consistent style throughout web assets.

Tables component

Fixed raised issues against this component:

• Update chevron icon inside sortable tables
• Fixed JS in sortable table
• Allow for table cell truncation
• Updated layout of our mobile table card

Contextual menu component

Fixed raised issues against this component:

• Updated to now allow items inside to grow to desired width
• Update accessibility outline to use Vanilla default

Maintenance

Continued code maintenance to the framework, some key bug fixes have been highlighted below and will come with our imminent v2.5.0 release:

• Buttons in dense tables
• Fix paddings on baseline grid
• Misaligned notification icons
• GitHub badges added to vanillaframework.io

New blog post

The lifecycle of a component: https://ubuntu.com/blog/the-lifecycle-of-components-in-your-design-system

Snapcraft

The Snapcraft team work closely with the snap store team to develop and maintain the snap store website.

Sprint in Vancouver

As previously mentioned by the JAAS squad, a planning sprint took place in Vancouver – the main outcomes for Snapcraft is the push towards Charmhub. While the JAAS squad have been focusing on the UX and design of Charmhub, Snapcraft will be repurposing and refactoring the Snap store codebase to make it more modular and reusable.

Release UI: Progressive releases

We’re still working on updates to the release UI’s progressive releases feature, ironing out bugs and preparing it for an internal release.

Progressive releases allow publishers to release a new revision of their snap to a specific % of devices. This is the first part of a series of features that will assist publishers in catching errors.

Build.snapcraft.io

This iteration we’ve also worked on listing the automated builds of build.snapcraft.io in snapcraft.io’s publisher area. Again this is early work and will be released internally first but will be an important addition to snapcraft.io. To implement the table we’ve used our internal react-components library which is a set of components based on Vanilla framework.

Maintenance

We fixed a couple of small issues on Snap details pages (both reported by our very own popey).

• Date truncated in install drop-down
• images incorrectly scaled on app page

Ubuntu

Team blog posts

• We reduced our Docker images by 60% with –no-install-recommends

• Avoiding dropped connections in nginx containers with “STOPSIGNAL SIGQUIT”

• The lifecycle of a component