implementation issue for template button
Release notes
Templates provide an easy way for you to get familiar with GitLab CI, we do have a large number of templates, however accessing them isn't intuitive, in this release we've added a way for you to navigate directly from the pipeline editor into our templating library, this way you can browse through the different templates GitLab support so you could easily copy-paste the most relevant one into your pipeline configuration
Problem
Currently the pipeline editor doesn't provide access to CI/CD templates.
The current experience
The current experience we have today in the web-ide and the single file editor has some drawbacks:
- Templates are hard to understand - it's practically impossible to know what each template is doing
- Unable to know when a new template is available
- Selecting the templates overrides your existing pipeline configuration
Proposal
What we learned?
We learned that most users would like to look at several templates and copy paste sections of them to their exiting pipeline configuration, so the current experience contradicts with the experience most users wants
What we can do?
- Instead of going with the boring (and temporary) solution of adding a dropdown to the editor, (similar to the way it works today in the web-ide/single file editor), we can add a button that links to the template library to be opened up in a separated window so users could view/browse and copy-paste section of the pipeline.
- this functionality should work both for self managed and .com
Design
See the latest design attached below. The design discussions can be found on the previous design versions.
What does success look like, and how can we measure that?
Success Metrics - 10% user engagement with templates
- How to measure - we already tracking the numbers of users that navigate to the pipeline editor, let's track the number of unique users that click the template button.