Embedding a widget on MDN for feedback

[Robert Nyman]

Hi,

We are working on a service to get good and constructive feedback and ideas from developers, where the first one out the gate is a collaboration with the Developer Tools team. This is based on a 3rd party service called UserVoice, and we are evaluating how this would get the biggest impact.

One thing that really makes sense would be to embed the UserVoice widget for our feedback channel on the Developer Tools pages on MDN. That would be right in context and developers having feedback or ideas could quickly add those/vote for existing ones.

I’ve put together two example widgets at:

http://robertnyman.com/dev-tools/dev-tools-mdn.html

One for SmartVoting, one for embedding a more full view. Naturally there are more customization options, having an icon to pop it up and more.

The way MDN works right now, though (for very valid security reasons), you can’t embed JavaScript on a wiki page.

Therefore, I want to discuss what options we have to show widgets on the Dev Tools pages on MDN, especially to avoid developer dependency when we want to add/tweak a widget.

Could we:

- Add widget embedding as an extra feature to wiki pages?
- Allow users with certain permissions to embed JavaScript?
- Any other option?

I believe this would be a great addition to the feedback channel itself, and a quick way to reach already interested developer, keep that interest and hopefully make it stronger! Help me find a good way how we could accomplish this.


- Robert

[Robert Nyman]

Hi,

Checking in on this again:

The short summary (see complete info below) is that we need to embed JavaScript widgets on MDN.
How do we best do that?


- Robert

[Francesco Iovine]

Hi Robert,

+1000 for the idea to let reader give feedback and ideas directly through
MDN.

I don't work on the website development, however the first things I thought
when reading your mail were: "Why an external widget? Doesn't MDN use
Personas for authentication? Wouldn't an HTML form be enough to get the
feedback and send it to the server? Are you going to publish feedback and
ideas and let people leave comments?".

Hope it helps!

Francesco <https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/profiles/franciov>

> _______________________________________________
> dev-mdn mailing list
> dev...@lists.mozilla.org
> https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-mdn
>

[Janet Swisher]

On 4/8/14 5:16 AM, Francesco Iovine wrote:
> Hi Robert,
>
> +1000 for the idea to let reader give feedback and ideas directly through
> MDN.
>
> I don't work on the website development, however the first things I thought
> when reading your mail were: "Why an external widget? Doesn't MDN use
> Personas for authentication? Wouldn't an HTML form be enough to get the
> feedback and send it to the server? Are you going to publish feedback and
> ideas and let people leave comments?".
>

The point of using Uservoice is that is already handles things like
publishing the feedback and letting people leave comments. If we rolled
our own, that's more code to write and maintain.

--
Janet Swisher <mailto:jREMOVE...@mozilla.com>
Mozilla Developer Network <https://developer.mozilla.org>
Developer Relations Community Organizer

[Robert Nyman]

On 08 Apr 2014, at 12:16, Francesco Iovine <f.io...@gmail.com> wrote:

> +1000 for the idea to let reader give feedback and ideas directly through MDN.
>
> I don't work on the website development, however the first things I thought when reading your mail were: "Why an external widget? Doesn't MDN use Personas for authentication? Wouldn't an HTML form be enough to get the feedback and send it to the server? Are you going to publish feedback and ideas and let people leave comments?”.

Thanks, glad you like the idea! Like Janet mentioned, with UserVoice all the feedback is collated and published on our forum there, where people can vote for ideas/requests, have new ideas and much more (a sneak peak is available at http://ffdevtools.uservoice.com/ - feel free to try it out, but don’t spread the word about it yet).

We did have a discussion about using SuMo or Input, but the features we needed and what’s in the roadmap for those products didn’t match, so we made a joint decision - paired with the Dev Tools team requirements - to go to a 3rd party service that meet what we wanted.

Therefore, embedding a widget on MDN would be a drastical improvement in gathering user feedback.


- Robert

> Mozilla Developer Network
> Developer Relations Community Organizer

[Luke Crouch]

On 4/3/14 3:28 AM, Robert Nyman wrote:
> Could we:
>
> - Add widget embedding as an extra feature to wiki pages?
> - Allow users with certain permissions to embed JavaScript?
> - Any other option?

Les,

This might be easy?

We have a KUMA_WIKI_IFRAME_ALLOWED_HOSTS config with a white-list of
domains from which we allow iframes. (youtube.com, rpm.newrelic.com,
mdn.mozillademos.org, etc.)

UserVoice has an iframe embed option:

https://developer.uservoice.com/docs/widgets/methods/#embed-widget

So we could:

1. Add widget.uservoice.com to KUMA_WIKI_IFRAME_ALLOWED_HOSTS
2. Add the small <script> block to our template
3. Add the <div> placeholder to the Dev Tools wiki page

If Les approves, Robert please file a bug for this.

Thanks,
-L

--
Q: Why is this email five sentences or less?
A: http://five.sentenc.es

[Richard Bloor]

Hi

I had some experience with UserVoice on another (very different) project -
while I'm sure you have it in hand, one lesson that should have been learnt
in that case was - make sure you resource the feedback
review/management/moderation properly. If possible I'd suggest rolling it
out to a limited number of pages/section of the site to gauge the volume and
put the resources in place before making it universal.

Regards
Richard Bloor



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Today's Topics:

1. Re: Embedding a widget on MDN for feedback (Janet Swisher)
2. Re: Embedding a widget on MDN for feedback (Robert Nyman)
3. Re: Embedding a widget on MDN for feedback (Luke Crouch)


----------------------------------------------------------------------

Message: 1
Date: Tue, 08 Apr 2014 08:29:04 -0500
From: Janet Swisher <jswi...@mozilla.com>
To: Francesco Iovine <f.io...@gmail.com>, Robert Nyman
<rob...@mozilla.com>
Cc: Maris Fogels <ma...@mozilla.com>, Jeff Griffiths
<jgrif...@mozilla.com>, Angelina Fabbro
<ange...@mozilla.com>,
dev...@lists.mozilla.org, Holly Habstritt
<hhabs...@mozilla.com>,
Luke Crouch <lcr...@mozilla.com>
Subject: Re: Embedding a widget on MDN for feedback
Message-ID: <5343F9A0...@mozilla.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed

On 4/8/14 5:16 AM, Francesco Iovine wrote:
> Hi Robert,
>
> +1000 for the idea to let reader give feedback and ideas directly

> +through

>>> Could we:
>>>
>>> - Add widget embedding as an extra feature to wiki pages?
>>> - Allow users with certain permissions to embed JavaScript?
>>> - Any other option?
>>>

>>> I believe this would be a great addition to the feedback channel
>>> itself,
>> and a quick way to reach already interested developer, keep that
>> interest and hopefully make it stronger! Help me find a good way how
>> we could accomplish this.
>>

--

Janet Swisher <mailto:jREMOVE...@mozilla.com>
Mozilla Developer Network <https://developer.mozilla.org> Developer
Relations Community Organizer

------------------------------

Message: 2
Date: Tue, 8 Apr 2014 15:57:55 +0200
From: Robert Nyman <rob...@mozilla.com>
To: Janet Swisher <jswi...@mozilla.com>
Cc: Maris Fogels <ma...@mozilla.com>, Jeff Griffiths
<jgrif...@mozilla.com>, Francesco Iovine
<f.io...@gmail.com>,
Angelina Fabbro <ange...@mozilla.com>, dev...@lists.mozilla.org,
Luke Crouch <lcr...@mozilla.com>, Holly Habstritt
<hhabs...@mozilla.com>
Subject: Re: Embedding a widget on MDN for feedback
Message-ID: <F0ACEEFA-CE70-4620...@mozilla.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=windows-1252

On 08 Apr 2014, at 12:16, Francesco Iovine <f.io...@gmail.com> wrote:

> +1000 for the idea to let reader give feedback and ideas directly through
MDN.
>
> I don't work on the website development, however the first things I
thought when reading your mail were: "Why an external widget? Doesn't MDN
use Personas for authentication? Wouldn't an HTML form be enough to get the
feedback and send it to the server? Are you going to publish feedback and

ideas and let people leave comments??.

Thanks, glad you like the idea! Like Janet mentioned, with UserVoice all the
feedback is collated and published on our forum there, where people can vote
for ideas/requests, have new ideas and much more (a sneak peak is available

at http://ffdevtools.uservoice.com/ - feel free to try it out, but don?t

spread the word about it yet).

We did have a discussion about using SuMo or Input, but the features we

needed and what?s in the roadmap for those products didn?t match, so we made

>>>> Could we:
>>>>
>>>> - Add widget embedding as an extra feature to wiki pages?
>>>> - Allow users with certain permissions to embed JavaScript?
>>>> - Any other option?
>>>>

>>>> I believe this would be a great addition to the feedback channel
itself,
>>> and a quick way to reach already interested developer, keep that
interest
>>> and hopefully make it stronger! Help me find a good way how we could
>>> accomplish this.
>>>
>
> --
> Janet Swisher
> Mozilla Developer Network
> Developer Relations Community Organizer

------------------------------

Message: 3
Date: Tue, 08 Apr 2014 11:44:01 -0500
From: Luke Crouch <lcr...@mozilla.com>
To: Robert Nyman <rob...@mozilla.com>, dev...@lists.mozilla.org
Cc: Jeff Griffiths <jgrif...@mozilla.com>, Maris Fogels
<ma...@mozilla.com>, Holly Habstritt <hhabs...@mozilla.com>,
Angelina
Fabbro <ange...@mozilla.com>
Subject: Re: Embedding a widget on MDN for feedback
Message-ID: <53442751...@mozilla.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=windows-1252; format=flowed

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[Robert Nyman]

> If Les approves, Robert please file a bug for this.

Definitely, sounds good. I’ll file a bug if Les says it’s a go.
Les, what do you think?


- Robert

[Les Orchard]

----- Original Message -----
> From: "Luke Crouch" <lcr...@mozilla.com>
> Sent: Tuesday, April 8, 2014 12:44:01 PM
>
> UserVoice has an iframe embed option:
>
> https://developer.uservoice.com/docs/widgets/methods/#embed-widget

This UserVoice embed works entirely on the client side by injecting <iframe>s via JS. It's kind of a misnomer, because it's a JS embed option that happens to use <iframes>

So, KUMA_WIKI_IFRAME_ALLOWED_HOSTS doesn't apply here at all. That filtering is applied only on the server side to literal <iframe>s in doc source.

> So we could:

>
> 2. Add the small <script> block to our template
> 3. Add the <div> placeholder to the Dev Tools wiki page
>
> If Les approves, Robert please file a bug for this.

No step #1, because it wouldn't do anything.

We *will* probably have to add data-uv-embed as a whitelisted attribute in Bleach, though.

I'm fine with the rest, as long as we:

1) Trust adding UserVoice's JS to our pages, and

2) Are okay with anyone being able to add an embed to this widget on any page.

--
Les Orchard <lorc...@mozilla.com>
{web,mad,computer} scientist

[Les Orchard]

----- Original Message -----
> From: "Robert Nyman" <rob...@mozilla.com>
> Sent: Thursday, April 3, 2014 4:28:10 AM
>
> Could we:
>
> - Add widget embedding as an extra feature to wiki pages?
> - Allow users with certain permissions to embed JavaScript?
> - Any other option?

Just to circle back to this original email, because I get asked this kind of question a few times a month...

We do not have a way to individually control what kind of content a particular user can author on a particular MDN page or section of a page.

So, all authors of MDN markup (even KumaScript templates) get the same constraints as to what they can author & where. That is, if anyone could embed JS, then everyone would be able to.

Some future options I've considered include:

1) Lift markup restrictions on a page, but restrict editing to a very trusted group.

2) Lift markup restrictions on a section of a page, again with restricted editing.

3) Include a block at the end of pages with no markup restrictions, editable separately from general doc content by users with permission.

The most feasible is #1, but we don't have those kind of permissions implemented yet.

At worst, #2 suggests applying access controls to a server-side managed HTML5 DOM tree for each document. It could probably be simplified - e.g. somehow marking off "protected" hunks of markup & not going full DOM crazy. In any case, having some parts editable and some off limits would make the WYSIWYG editor a bit hairy.

For #3, it would allow trusted authors to throw arbitrary JS & etc into pages. But, you wouldn't easily be able to mix restricted & privileged markup throughout a page. You'd have to sprinkle markup throughout the page with special data-* attributes or CSS classes. Then, use those in a selector to do the magical client-side things via JS.

But, the kinds of things we do for #3 would probably be useful across the site, so we might as well consider those as general libraries to add at the Kuma level.

[Eric Shepherd]

On 2014-04-09 17:48:21 +0000, Les Orchard said:

> 2) Are okay with anyone being able to add an embed to this widget on any page.

This is not acceptable, IMHO, unless we can restrict it to a very
specific configuration of the widget. We don't really want people
embedding any kind of feedback widget they want. :)

--
Eric Shepherd
Developer Documentation Lead
Mozilla
Blog: http://www.bitstampede.com/
Twitter: @sheppy

[Robert Nyman]

Thanks for explaining, Les. TO get as concrete as possible:

1. What could we do now, i.e. what would be the best way to get those widgets onto MDM as soon as possible?
2. Regarding “Lift markup restrictions on a page, but restrict editing to a very trusted group”:
I think that seems like a reasonable approach. Do you have any rough estimate what time that would take to develop, if it was prioritized?


- Robert

[Les Orchard]

If we have a very specific configuration in mind, for a very specific page...

It would be a bit hacky, but maybe we could put together some JS on the Kuma side that looks for a <div class="dev-feedback"/> on that particular document and embeds the exact widgets we need? We could iterate on that if/when we want to embed on additional pages.

----- Original Message -----
> From: "Eric Shepherd" <eshe...@mozilla.com>
> To: dev...@lists.mozilla.org
> Sent: Wednesday, April 9, 2014 11:59:56 PM
> Subject: Re: Embedding a widget on MDN for feedback
>

> _______________________________________________
> dev-mdn mailing list
> dev...@lists.mozilla.org
> https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-mdn
>

[Les Orchard]

BTW, is there a bug filed for this? we probably should have had most of this discussion there.

----- Original Message -----
> From: "Robert Nyman" <rob...@mozilla.com>
> Sent: Thursday, April 10, 2014 9:07:58 AM
>
> Thanks for explaining, Les. TO get as concrete as possible:
>
> 1. What could we do now, i.e. what would be the best way to get those widgets
> onto MDM as soon as possible?

Probably the quickest (albeit hacky) way is to write some JS on the Kuma side that looks for specific markup on a specific page and swaps in some specific widget embeds.

That would need MDN dev time to tweak & customize, but that would go faster than adding the Kuma infrastructure to let that be edited through the site.

> 2. Regarding “Lift markup restrictions on a page, but restrict editing to a
> very trusted group”:
> I think that seems like a reasonable approach. Do you have any rough
> estimate what time that would take to develop, if it was prioritized?

It would be two separate projects:

1) Restrict editing to a group (bug 768498), ~2-3 weeks. We never finished implementing editing permissions. Might be a bit tricky, so we'd need to take some time to get it right.

2) Lift markup restrictions for a page (no bug yet), ~1 week. Mostly opting a page out of the Bleach filtering, but then also constraining permission to flip that switch.

[Les Orchard]

----- Original Message -----
> From: "Robert Nyman" <rob...@mozilla.com>
> Sent: Thursday, April 10, 2014 9:07:58 AM

Zimbra seems vaguely awful and may have eaten my email. If not, this might be a resend:

[Robert Nyman]

Thanks for the info. We hadn’t filed a bug yet, since we didn’t know what to file it for, but I agree it makes sense to have one now.
I filed this:

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=994738

Feel free to add any additional/relevant information to that bug.


- Robert

On 10 Apr 2014, at 17:04, Les Orchard <lorc...@mozilla.com> wrote:

> BTW, is there a bug filed for this? we probably should have had most of this discussion there.
>

> ----- Original Message -----
>> From: "Robert Nyman" <rob...@mozilla.com>
>> Sent: Thursday, April 10, 2014 9:07:58 AM
>>

>> Thanks for explaining, Les. TO get as concrete as possible:
>>

[Luke Crouch]

You had me at "a bit hacky" ... :)

Actually, adding that to wiki.js doesn't sound hacky to me. Could we
even put <div class="dev-feedback"/> in the Tools Subnav to
automatically add it to all the zone's pages?

-L

On 4/10/14 9:53 AM, Les Orchard wrote:
> If we have a very specific configuration in mind, for a very specific page...
>
> It would be a bit hacky, but maybe we could put together some JS on the Kuma side that looks for a <div class="dev-feedback"/> on that particular document and embeds the exact widgets we need? We could iterate on that if/when we want to embed on additional pages.
>

> ----- Original Message -----
>> >From: "Eric Shepherd"<eshe...@mozilla.com>
>> >To:dev...@lists.mozilla.org
>> >Sent: Wednesday, April 9, 2014 11:59:56 PM
>> >Subject: Re: Embedding a widget on MDN for feedback
>> >

>> >_______________________________________________
>> >dev-mdn mailing list
>> >dev...@lists.mozilla.org
>> >https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-mdn
>> >

> -- Les Orchard <lorc...@mozilla.com> {web,mad,computer} scientist

> _______________________________________________ dev-mdn mailing list
> dev...@lists.mozilla.org https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-mdn

--

[Ali Spivak]

So, going back to the original intent as opposed to the implementation - I'm assuming that the devtools team is going to me monitoring and responding to the feedback that comes up on UserVoice? Would someone be assigned to manage all of the feedback?



ali spivak
408-859-8260
asp...@mozilla.com

----- Original Message -----
From: "Robert Nyman" <rob...@mozilla.com>
To: dev...@lists.mozilla.org
Cc: "Jeff Griffiths" <jgrif...@mozilla.com>, "Maris Fogels" <ma...@mozilla.com>, "Holly Habstritt" <hhabs...@mozilla.com>, "Luke Crouch" <lcr...@mozilla.com>, "Angelina Fabbro" <ange...@mozilla.com>
Sent: Thursday, April 3, 2014 1:28:10 AM
Subject: Embedding a widget on MDN for feedback

Hi,

We are working on a service to get good and constructive feedback and ideas from developers, where the first one out the gate is a collaboration with the Developer Tools team. This is based on a 3rd party service called UserVoice, and we are evaluating how this would get the biggest impact.

One thing that really makes sense would be to embed the UserVoice widget for our feedback channel on the Developer Tools pages on MDN. That would be right in context and developers having feedback or ideas could quickly add those/vote for existing ones.

I’ve put together two example widgets at:

http://robertnyman.com/dev-tools/dev-tools-mdn.html

One for SmartVoting, one for embedding a more full view. Naturally there are more customization options, having an icon to pop it up and more.

The way MDN works right now, though (for very valid security reasons), you can’t embed JavaScript on a wiki page.

Therefore, I want to discuss what options we have to show widgets on the Dev Tools pages on MDN, especially to avoid developer dependency when we want to add/tweak a widget.

Could we:

- Add widget embedding as an extra feature to wiki pages?
- Allow users with certain permissions to embed JavaScript?
- Any other option?

I believe this would be a great addition to the feedback channel itself, and a quick way to reach already interested developer, keep that interest and hopefully make it stronger! Help me find a good way how we could accomplish this.

- Robert

[Robert Nyman]

> So, going back to the original intent as opposed to the implementation - I'm assuming that the devtools team is going to me monitoring and responding to the feedback that comes up on UserVoice? Would someone be assigned to manage all of the feedback?

Monitoring and responding will be done as a joint effort between the Evangelism and Dev Tools team - in practice, me, Jeff Griffiths, Angelina Fabbro and Alex Kratel. You could see me as responsible for the overall effort itself.


- Robert

[Jeff Griffiths]

Robert Nyman wrote:
>> So, going back to the original intent as opposed to the
>> implementation - I'm assuming that the devtools team is going to me
>> monitoring and responding to the feedback that comes up on
>> UserVoice? Would someone be assigned to manage all of the
>> feedback?
>

> Monitoring and responding will be done as a joint effort between the
> Evangelism and Dev Tools team - in practice, me, Jeff Griffiths,
> Angelina Fabbro and Alex Kratel. You could see me as responsible for
> the overall effort itself.

This is the right group IMO, I see the feedback channel as primarily a
Product Management / Revrel tool as one of our inputs into Product
strategy as well as a single point of response to feedback that doesn't
easily fit into bugs.

Jeff

[Ali Spivak]

Great - thanks. We used to have an instance of UserVoice on MDN before I started, and it required a lot of monitoring, so I just wanted to check before we went ahead with this.

ali spivak
408-859-8260
asp...@mozilla.com

----- Original Message -----

[Jeff Griffiths]

...and that's my one concern, and why we should review the program's
worth and time commitments regularly. I think this might be worth doing
( enough to give it a try ) but if it's not we may need to move on.

Robert: what do you think of adding a 'Beta' badge to the header to
indicate to users this is a trial program that could change?

Jeff

[Robert Nyman]

Ali Spivak <asp...@mozilla.com> wrote:

> Great - thanks. We used to have an instance of UserVoice on MDN before I started, and it required a lot of monitoring, so I just wanted to check before we went ahead with this.

Yeah, definitely. Also, the widgets should just be an easier way to contribute to the central location at http://ffdevtools.uservoice.com/ where everything will be available.

Jeff Griffiths <jgrif...@mozilla.com> wrote:

> ...and that's my one concern, and why we should review the program's worth and time commitments regularly. I think this might be worth doing ( enough to give it a try ) but if it's not we may need to move on.

Yes, for sure, naturally it needs to be worth it.

> Robert: what do you think of adding a 'Beta' badge to the header to indicate to users this is a trial program that could change?

I don’t know, to be honest. I’m not necessarily against it, but I think there has been some fatique around calling things beta, having banners on logos and more. I believe we can describe it as experimental or similar instead in the abstract on the UserVoice page (and where it seems fit where we mention it in other communication).


- Robert