Provide pages empty state with setup instruction
Problem to solve
For a user that has never used GitLab pages before, it may be unclear the steps needed to deploy to pages. As part of the Experience Baselines and Recommendations initiative, it was determined users may struggle with discovering how to get started with GitLab pages. Assuming the project was not forked from a template, today to understand that process requires leaving the settings page to read the documentation. Reading through documentation as a first step is not an ideal experience. Currently, there is only a message to learn more and a link to the documentation. The documentation includes a lot of information on forking projects from templates that are not relevant to this situation, a project has already been created.
Intended users
Users with projects that use any static website generator or plain HTML that wish to leverage GitLab pages.
Proposal
On the settings page, add an empty state giving a brief description of the setup process and some quick steps to get started. A link to the general documentation should also be included to allow for a deeper dive if the quick steps require additional info. Empty state should be shown if a user has not deployed to pages.
- Links
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Learn more about pages
(Button)- /help/user/project/pages/index.md#how-it-works
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configure your CI/CD
(In paragraph text)- If the project has a .gitlab-ci.yml link to: /blob/master/.gitlab-ci.yml
- If the project does not link to: /new/master?commit_message=Add+.gitlab-ci.yml&file_name=.gitlab-ci.yml
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What does success look like, and how can we measure that?
Users may be able to skip reading the documentation and/or have a high-level understanding of the process directly from the settings page.