Schedule when a topic should be featured/unfeatured

Hello everyone! Thanks a lot for posting this idea. I'm curious to understand a bit more about this idea:

• What  type of topics you would like to feature? 
• Are we talking here about featuring topics on the homepage using the "featured topics"widget? Or in other pages as well?
• Does the featuring of topics follow a pattern? For instance you will always feature the most recent product updates? Is so what rules are you following?

=> I'm asking because we are considering building a new widget to feature automatically topics based on some criterias. For example: Always feature the 3 most recent product updates

@ZapierSteph @nicksimard I'm curious to also have your thoughts on this :)

@Marion Frecaut For us, it’s articles. We feature the last 3-4 articles on the homepage, which means every time a new one is published I have to go into the homepage customization, add the new one, and remove the oldest.

I’d love a replacement for that widget you have, that features topics based on moderator tag. Sounds like that’s what you have in mind here. Could be as simple as choosing the item type(s) (event, article, product update, idea) and how many to show. 

Could even be cool to mix and match. Like maybe we want events and articles and to always show the 4 most recent across both of those areas. Might be 4 articles, or could be 3 articles and 1 event (for example). You could choose everything and just always show the X number of most recent items.

Hope that helps!

Hello @nicksimard thanks for sharing this is super helpful indeed :)

@Marion Frecaut 

• What  type of topics you would like to feature? --->We try to feature a variety of types of content: upcoming event, recent article, FAQ, interesting discussion topic, latest product update, some company news, etc. So it would be nice if we could even have “place holders” where we can schedule to switch out one topic for another on a specific date, which would mean our layout doesn’t change (cards stay the same size).
• Are we talking here about featuring topics on the homepage using the "featured topics"widget? Or in other pages as well? --->For now, this would be most helpful for the homepage. But I probably would use it elsewhere if that was available.
• Does the featuring of topics follow a pattern? For instance you will always feature the most recent product updates? Is so what rules are you following? --->Yes, this would be helpful, as I’d like to keep the most recent product update in one place on the homepage. It would be great to have a widget as a placeholder and it just pops in the most recent one. This might be helpful to pop in the “most recent” of other topic types, like events or articles with a particular tag, for example, so we could post our most recent (e.g.) partner interview, or whatever.

Hey @Julian!

Can you provide an update on this one? It has a lot of votes and it would be a great feature.

Thanks!

- Gabriel

cc: @leah.breen 

I’d love this feature! For example, when I feature an event in a group, it needs to be removed once the event date passes. It would be really helpful if this process could be automated rather than manual. cc @GabrielDocuSign @Julian 

Hi both!

I agree, this would be a great improvement that could help with both community team efficiency as well as a more dynamic homepage experience. 

I am not aware of this exact improvement being on the roadmap right now, however I know that we are working on features that are relatively close to that (automating featured content via the dynamic content widget). I am wondering if scheduling to feature a topic is necessary as there is a workaround (we have scheduling a publish date & automatically feature new content already), but I really like the use case of un-featuring content once an event has passed.

Let me CC @Sebastian and @Sudhanshu as both probably will be interested in this input, and might also have questions or updates to share.

Hi everyone,

I am pleased to announce that we have begun implementing this idea with a few adjustments. Our current focus is on developing a scheduling feature for widgets. The goal is to enable users to set a start and/or end date for a widget. The widget will be visible to the end user only within the specified timeframe.

In Customize Mode, all widgets will be displayed, accompanied by small banners labeled Expired or Scheduled. Please note that expired widgets will need to be manually deleted to be removed from the page entirely. If no start date is selected, the widget will appear immediately. Similarly, if no end date is set, the widget will remain visible indefinitely.

We are sharing a UI preview from the Proof of Concept (PoC) and would greatly value your feedback. We are particularly interested in understanding the use cases where you would apply this functionality and the types of widgets you would like it to support. Additionally, please let us know if you would like to participate in beta testing for this feature.

 

Great to see that you’re picking this up!

Use case 1:

Right now, only users with the “Admin” or “Community Manager” role have permissions to use Customize Mode. If neither an Admin or Community Manager are present, we currently cannot change the Featured topics widget (or any other frontpage widget for that matter). So, scheduling widgets will help us finding a workaround for the existing issue that we cannot grant more granular permissions to users.

Use case 2:

Our company launches a new product. We prepare and schedule an article for that occasion. The article will be published on a certain date at a certain time (after the communication ban is being lifted). At the same time the article is being published, we will schedule the Featured topics widget accordingly so that it is being promoted immediately.

Use case 3:

From Monday to Sunday we will be having a sweepstake. During that time the sweepstake shall be promoted on the frontpage. So we will have a live Featured topics widget for now, a scheduled Featured topics widget for the duration of the sweepstake and another scheduled Featured topics widget (or the current Featured topics widget as the fallback - if possible) for after the sweepstake.

Types of widgets to support scheduling:

• Search Banner → exchange the hero banner temporarily → e.g. during christmas time or during a campaign
• Featured topics → exchange featured content and/or the order of the featured content
• Banner → show a banner temporarily → e.g. during a campaign
• HTML widget → show an HTML banner temporarily → e.g. during a campaign
• Nice to have: Recommendations

We’re interested in joining the Beta Testing.