Navigation for Project and Group Comment Templates
Proposal
We'd like to add a new navigation item to both projects and groups for Comment Templates
. In GitLab 16.0 we released comment templates. The navigation for this item is both from the menu where you use comment templates and within personal user preferences (seen below).
We're currently working on adding comment template support for Projects and Groups. This will allow organizations to define specific templates that they might want to use across an organization for something like Service Desk or a commenting standard for all merge requests (like conventional comments).
In order for organizations to manage these and differentiate from personal comment templates (free feature vs. paid for groups/projects) we need to introduce navigation for them to be managed. This is similar to things like labels that organizations manage for projects and groups in that it's something all users interact with.
We'd propose adding it under Manage -> Comment Templates
on both levels.
Existing nav entry for user preferences | Proposal for projects and groups |
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Other locations that were considered
Personal comment templates are currently managed based on the above information. We've looked at adding this as an item to when users actually try to use a comment template, but that's not as friendly to manage something to actually need to be in the process of using it.
@jtucker_gl and @phikai discussed a few options sync:
- Add a new nav entry at Manage > Comment templates – This mirrors the approach we took for Labels, which are also managed at the group and project level. It's the most straight-forward change to meet the feature requirements.
- Manage templates from the comment toolbar – This makes for odd UX, as we'd have so many options for adding a template: “Add personal comment template”, “Add group comment template”, “Add project comment template”
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Add a new nav entry at Manage > Templates (less specific than above) – We offer a variety of templating options in GitLab, so it would be nice to surface all of them in one place. However, the permissions and management approach vary greatly across template types:
- Merge commit templates are managed in the UI and only modifiable by maintainer role
- Comment templates are managed in the UI and can be modified by developer role
- Issue templates are managed via source code and require committer access
- Manage templates from Service Desk page – While there's likely a top primary usage for Service Desk, it's not the only area of the product that will use this. Comment Templates are also shared across all of GitLab so if we restrict it to Service Desk you'd then only be able to use Comment Templates if you had Service Desk enabled (which isn't the case for everyone).
Checklist
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Review the handbook page for navigation. -
Add relevant information to the issue description detailing your proposal, including usage and business drivers. -
List at least two other places you considered to introduce your feature. -
Add relevant designs to the Design Management area of the issue. -
Ensure your UI suggestion align with the Documentation Style Guide. -
Engage Technical Writing. They can help craft a term that best describes the feature(s) you’re proposing. -
Follow the product development workflow validation process to ensure you are solving a well understood problem and that the proposed change is understandable and non-disruptive to users. Navigation-specific research is mandatory for additions or when restructuring. -
Engage the Foundations Product Manager for approval. The Foundations DRI (@jtucker_gl) will work with UX partners in product design, research, and technical writing, as applicable. -
Consider whether you need to communicate the change somehow, or if you will have an interim period in the UI where your item will live in more than one place. -
Ensure engineers are familiar with the implementation steps for navigation.