Tag Pages in DCAR for Dotcom

[OllysCoding]

Coming back to this work, don't miss this comment
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What are tag fronts?

Fronts can generally be separated into two categories:

1. Pressed Fronts - These fronts, like https://www.theguardian.com/uk are ones that are created in the fronts tool by digital editors, and are then 'pressed' into a JSON form by facia-press in Frontend.
2. Tag Pages - These pages, like https://www.theguardian.com/tone/minutebyminute are similar to fronts but created automatically, and come with a tag created in tag manager. They display a date ordered set of content associated with a given tag.

DCR's pressed front rollout is (almost) complete - but tag fronts need their own data model & features, which need to be built & supported.

What's left to do?

Pre 1%

Preview Give feedback

1. Address ordering bug (ensure grouped cards are sorted) #8315
   Tag Pages Tag Pages Go-live 1% +2
   
2. Tidy up spacing on pagination #8317
   Bugs from the Fronts migration Tag Pages +2
   
3. Fix font sizing / color on containers #8318
   Tag Pages Tag Pages Go-live 1% +2
   
4. Investigate ‘missing’ days (e.g most recent days content missing on tone/minutebyminute #8319
   Tag Pages Tag Pages Go-live 1% +2
   
5. Identify which tag fronts cannot be served in a 1% test #9365
   Tag Pages Tag Pages Go-live 1% +2
6. Create & launch 1% test #8320
   Tag Pages Tag Pages Go-live 1% +2
   

Post 1%

Preview Give feedback

1. Support individual date routes (/all) #8321
   +0
2. Support /theguardian #8322
   Team Candidate: Fronts and Curation +1
3. Support tag combiners #8323
   Team Candidate: Fronts and Curation +1
4. Support /help/accessibility #11494
   Pick me up Tag Pages +2
   

Subjects / Contributors

Preview Give feedback

1. Support subjects pages #8324
   Team Candidate: Fronts and Curation +1
2. Support contributor pages #8325
   +0

Bugs found during 1% test

Preview Give feedback

1. [Tag Pages] Pagination missing on /all URLs #10556
   Tag Pages +1
   
2. [Tag Pages] Sponsorship badges missing #10557
   Pick me up Tag Pages +2
   
3. [Tag Pages] Top border missing from subnav above footer #10558
   Pick me up Tag Pages +2
   
4. [Tag Pages] Pillar selection missing #10559
   Pick me up Tag Pages +2
   

Bugs found during 20% test

Preview Give feedback

1. Do not show avatar in contributors tag pages #11491
   Tag Pages +1
   

[OllysCoding]

Revisiting Tag Fronts? Here's what you need to know

What are they?
Tag fronts are automatically generated fronts that exist alongside a tag created in tag manager. They are paginated pages which display all the content published to a tag in date order.

Stories on tag fronts are grouped into containers much like on pressed fronts, however since there's no curation, containers are date based, a container will either show all the stories for a given day, or a given month, depending on the frequency content is being published to that tag.

The standard URL for a tag front is www.theguardian.com/<tag ID>. Tags IDs generally contain a forward slash /, e.g tone/minutebyminute. When both sides of the tag is the same, e.g politics/politics, the url would only contain the one part, e.g www.theguardian.com/politics.

Tag fronts can be overwritten by pressed fronts, e.g in the case of https://www.theguardian.com/tone/recipes. In this case, the tag front can be found at www.theguardian.com/<tag ID>/all, e.g https://www.theguardian.com/tone/recipes/all.

There are a few other variants of tag fronts as well:

• Date pages: Gives you all articles published for a tag on a specific day, using www.theguardian.com/<tag ID>/<year>/<month>/<day>/all e.g https://www.theguardian.com/tone/minutebyminute/2023/nov/14/all
• Tag combiners: Pages where two tags are combined and resulting matching articles are shown, using the url www.theugardian.com/<tag 1 id>+<tag 2 id>, e.g https://www.theguardian.com/tone/minutebyminute+politics/politics
• Custom pages: Pages which follow a similar structure but are on custom URLs, the known example of this is: https://www.theguardian.com/theguardian

There are a few others that will be detailed later.

What has been done so far?

PRs: guardian/frontend#26149 #7752 guardian/frontend#26233 #8056 #9336 #9340 #9344 #9405 #9450

In frontend we have defined a datamodel for tag fronts, and set up the ability for frontend to send requests to DCR with that model, and created a 'TagFrontPicker' that decides what rendering tier to render tag fronts on.

In DCR we've created a tag front layout, all the accomanying types, models & data transformation as well as pagination & ad support.

What does this result in?

We support the following URLs

• www.theguardian.com/<tag ID>
• www.theguardian.com/<tag ID>/all

We don't support the following URLs

• www.theguardian.com/<tag ID>/<year>/<month>/<day>/all
• www.theguardian.com/<tag ID 1>+<tag ID 2>
• www.theguardian.com/theguardian

What to do first

The best first step is to work toward launching a 1% test. This will allow you to test that everything that's been implemented up and till now is working as expected, before investing further effort in the other tag front URLs.

Before launching a 1% test, you'll need to identify which tag fronts should be excluded. Some tag fronts have extra data injected by Frontend, which won't yet be supported by DCR. Some known examples of this are the accessibility help page: https://www.theguardian.com/help/accessibility-help and football teams: https://www.theguardian.com/football/paris-fc.

Once this is complete, you should be good-to-go with the usual 1% DCR migration approach (set up 0% test in order to check everything, talk to d&i, notify Central prod & user help, launch)

What to do second

Once the 1% test launch is complete, you can start to migrate the other 'types' of tag pages, for each of these you'll generally want to follow a formula along the lines of:

• Investigate differences: What makes this page different that normal tag fronts, e.g different pagination, different data, etc.
• Determine how much can be re-used, e.g the data model, DCR endpoint, DCR layout & components
• Build frontend side, hook up the json datamodel or adjust as required
• Build DCR side, make necessary adjustments to support any different data, or visual changes.

Subjects / Contributors

This seems like a good time to migrate the subjects & contributors pages as well. They can be found here:

https://www.theguardian.com/index/subjects
https://www.theguardian.com/index/contributors

[cemms1]

Edited title and description to reflect chosen terminology of "tag pages" rather than referring to them as "fronts"