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Change how we do tier badges

Issue

We need to do something different for tier badges, for many reasons:

  • The process to add new tier badges is currently fairly complicated and difficult to update. (There are pipeline dependencies and we do a lot of work to strip the links out of titles that have badges.)
  • Each time we add a new "pill" the UI becomes more complex, and our offerings harder to understand.
  • We're running out of room to add "pills" after the titles.
  • When we replatform the docs site, we have to re-do how we do them anyway.
  • Using only color to distinguish the “type” of badge (tier, offering, status) is not accessible to all users.
  • Adding new badge types has made the existing content unclear in the /help context, where the “type” is not visible.

Proposed solution

The idea is to:

  • Have the markdown be closer to the language shown on the docs site.
  • Remove dependencies on the gitlab-docs project. Make adding a new badge as simple as adding the word in the markdown file.
  • Combine the tier/offering/status information with the version history bullets.
  • Make it an expandable/collapsible section.

For example:

# Has availability info, multiple history items

DETAILS:
**Tier:** Free, Premium, Ultimate
**Offering:** Self-managed

> - [Introduced](https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/merge_requests/85689) in GitLab 15.0 [with a flag](../administration/feature_flags.md) named `inactive_projects_deletion`. Disabled by default.
> - [Feature flag `inactive_projects_deletion`](https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/merge_requests/96803) removed in GitLab 15.4.
> - Configuration through GitLab UI [introduced](https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/merge_requests/85575) in GitLab 15.1.

Collapsed:

image

Expanded:

image

Caveats/downsides to this approach

  • Combining them creates a large block of text, usually right at the top of a page.
  • The markdown is a little complicated and may be error prone, but hopefully we can test with some Vale rules/regex.
  • This solution could use more design expertise, but for now is an MVC.
  • We are not renaming "SaaS" in this effort.

Great things about this solution

  • It gives us lots of room to grow.
  • We can spell out Free, Premium, Ultimate, rather than saying "All offerings." Hopefully this helps users understand our licensing a bit better.

Future work

Edited by Suzanne Selhorn