Making Phabricator More Public-Friendly

[Kamil Paral]

> I was able to get the root uri display a similar page as what a logged
> in user can see:
> 
> https://phab.qadevel-stg.cloud.fedoraproject.org/

I see only the sidebar and a blank page:
http://i.imgur.com/Z8EBlDx.png

Is that expected? Could we for example display the Feed contents on that blank page?

> 
> It does require hacking on the code and as near as I can tell, the
> changes can't be done as an extension. The changes are pretty sane,
> though so I'll start a conversation with upstream on whether they'd be
> interested in a patch.

Great. However, I wouldn't like to keep you distracted from Taskotron. I was interested in some changes, if they are possible, to improve the public access. But at the moment I think it's not as important as coding the Taskotron basic infrastructure. So it depends how much time-consuming this is.

> 
> Changing the sidebar layout, however, is a different story. The
> placement logic uses metadata in the code to determine where the icons
> are placed and how big they are. This is great from a dev point of view
> because you don't need any crazy logic for layout or need to update it
> all the time. Not so much if you want to change the default layout,
> though.
> 
> If we want to change the default layout, I see 3 options:
> 
> 1. maintain an out-of-band patch that either changes the application
>    metadata so that the display works how we want or change the display
>    logic so that it works differently.
> 
>     This is how the blender instance is set up - they changed the
>     metadata in applications so that they would be rendered differently
>     from the defaults. Not the prettiest thing ever but reasonably
>     maintainable and effective. I suspect this would cause problems
>     with any custom layouts that folks set, though.
> 
> 
> 2. hack a hard-coded default into the display logic, overriding the
>    current logic-based defaults.
> 
>     This should allow for users to customize the sidebar as they want
>     while not being a terrible hack. It would require more work and a
>     decent understanding of the codebase, though. I also suspect that
>     maintenance would be a bit more difficult.
> 
> 
> 3. Work with upstream (if they're interested) on a way to set a default
>    layout for the sidebar.
> 
>     This would be quite a bit of work, assuming that upstream would
>     even be interested in the functionality. It would be most likely to
>     not cause maintenance headaches in the future, though.
> 
>     
> If we're going to change the sidebar layout, I'm of the opinion that
> option 1 is the best for us, for now. We're already on a tight deadline
> and I don't want to spend too much more time hacking on support tools
> right now. FAS auth integration is already going to take some work, so
> there's that task for the near future as well but phabricator already
> has persona auth support and I'm not expecting that task to be terrible.

The interesting thing is that a registered user can already override the application metadata inside his user preferences dialog. I don't talk about arrangement of the tiles, but you can influence their size and visibility. It's a bit surprising that these defaults can't be adjusted on the application level.

Tim, have you tried the simplest route of just listing all the applications that we don't want to use in "uninstalled-applications" option? I would like to avoid any more custom patches for the moment, and IIIUC this should give us want we want without any complications. We can always enable a particular application again if we decide to use it. And it gives us what we want - less cluttered sidebar.

We can also disable Beta applications inside Phab configuration, because I believe we don't use any of them? Another way to trim down what we see by default.