Thanks for creating this detailed proposal, @nicksellen, and for the mockup, @bruno! Thinking of food saving groups, I imagine that this will make it easier to include sharing locations and event planning.
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Damn, I even forgot the sharing locations on my mockup! 
At least in my group we would definitely have them.
Some progress! Still quite a lot to do, but these types are defined in my local database, and displayed by the frontend.
The idea would still be to try and get this ready for deployment before allowing groups to create their own custom types, but when they can create them it will still include the ability to edit the existing types with no limitations.
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Hooray! Awesome! I’m happy to see progress in this topic!
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Btw, I forgot to mention that one activity type, “distribution”, is recurring in my group and some others that I’ve seen, if 4 default types are a good start. Otherwise, if we want to keep 3 types only for foodsaving groups, I’d guess that Tasks can be put aside in favor of Distributions.
I’d quite like to include the most minimal number that might make sense to all groups, and anything less common can be created by them (once I’ve worked on that functionality of course). On the other hand, once the functionality is progressed they’d also be able to remove types that don’t seem relevant.
I wonder if distribution events are that common though? Maybe just a generic “Event” type is more useful?
On our weekly meeting we decided to make a poll to ask users what types of activities they’d like by default in their groups!
Let us know what you prefer here: Which activity types should we enable for new and existing groups?
Taking the input from the poll, I have this update…
Points:
- I added “Activity” for totally generic activities, mostly actually thinking about something to set existing “Pickup” activities as for non-foodsaving groups…
- input on icons/colours? (font awesome icon list and maybe these material icons too, there is a nice colour palette we can use, I suggest we only use dark colours)
- is this a final list before deploying to dev?
- I didn’t quite figure out
a) which types should be added for general/bikekitchen groups
b) which type to set for existing activities for general/bikekitchen groups - in general I don’t want to implement a feature that let’s people change the type of an activity (as it makes the programming a lot harder to think about, feedback, and lots of stuff…), but initially it seems like it could be useful, hmmm.
You can try it out now at https://add-custom-activity-types.dev.karrot.world (uses same credentials as https://dev.karrot.world)!
For foodsaving groups I made it create: Meeting, Pickup, Distribution, Event (as per the survey) (and set existing activities to “Pickup” type)
For other groups: Meeting, Event, Activity (and set existing activities to “Activity” type)
Still scope for setting the icons/colours (actually I notice I used a different one that the screenshot for distribution… I prefer the screenshot one actually fixed).
Two outstanding questions me and @tiltec have been pondering over are:
how to handle lots of pickup → activity changes in the text
once this change is merged, there will be a bunch of translation work to do, right now I mostly did “dumb” conversations replacing the word “pickup” with “activity”, but we have the opportunity to make the texts more intuitive/helpful/clearer, etc… given they will all need to be re-translated anyway… you can see a code level diff of the texts over here (the old on the left, in red, the new on the right, in green). I guess we should also leave some time before deploying to give time for the translations to get updated…
how to help the users understand "what happened to the pickups page?"
I think this is most clear in the case of the main navigation menu (see below), I tried an option to have a little “badge” showing that something was updated, with a hover tooltip to explain that it used to be called “Pickups”, but maybe not sufficient? the hover tooltip probably isn’t very useful on mobile… would welcome other ideas! There may also be other places that are confusing?
This is the issue on github, but here is probably best place to comment, I’m easy though!
I think a question mark instead of updated and a dialog when clicking on it with a simple explanation and maybe a link would work fine. What’s this is also good, easier to click on than a question mark, but a question mark feels friendlier and more inviting to me personally to click on, for whatever strange reason.
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I think it makes a lot of sense to add Task to a general purpose group . I think it’s something that a lot of groups could use as a to do-list. I can see this being used on the Bike Kitchen group for the task of buying tools or some other bike parts. And this would probably be a type that would not necessarily require a specific time and place, thinking now about future development…
Sounds reasonable, would that be instead of the Activity type? And also to set all existing activities as an Activity?
I was thinking of Task as a fourth type, and set existing activities as an Activity, since Activity is the most general type I can think of.
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Ok, I implemented it like this now:
It’s not the most beautiful in the world but maybe/hopefully acceptable!
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Not a work of art for sure, but very functional!
Where does the “Read More” lead to? I think a nice little informative text would be something like “Activities named pickups are still available in foodsaving groups. We just added other types of activities, like Meetings, Events and Distributions”
Ah yeah, the idea was to write a community forum post about it. Although that has the downside it’ll only be in English. So maybe a short text on the site similar to what you said in addition to what is already there?
Yep, sounds good to me!
@bruno activity types is just about ready to merge, but just before we do, maybe you want another look at the translation string changes? Me and @tiltec went through and changed some, putting the activity type name into the strings a bit more, you can see those changes here → Support activity types by nicksellen · Pull Request #2207 · yunity/karrot-frontend · GitHub
… and also changed wording on the dialog above to make it sound more positive!
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