Enable better product transparency by allowing hyperlinks in product description field

What is the need / problem ?

Right now users have different levels of functinality in different text fields. Specifically - they can insert hypertext when setting up their enterprise profile description. BUT they do not have the same functionality when they describe their products.

Problems with this:

  1. Confusing to users - why don 't they have the same functionality wherever they enter text?

  2. Missing a significant opportunity for our users to link to helpful information.

Use cases that have emerged in Canada recently:

  1. User wants to help consumers understand what a particular property (ie ā€˜free-rangeā€™, ā€˜localā€™) means, and wants to link to relevant on-line material.
  2. A group of producers are helping to start a sustainable food initiative and want to donate part of the sales from particular products to help fund the new project. Theyā€™d like to link those product descriptions to info about the new project and its funding campaign.

I think there are a number of other ways that our users would want to link to on-line information: recipee archives, links to events, links to food justice campaignsā€¦

Who does it impact ?

Producers and hubs selling through OFN.

What is the current impact of the problem ?

Some information concerning products are hard to share with customers.

What is the benefit of focusing on this ?

Improve transparency, clarity of information about products from producers to customers.

Potential solutions that will solve the problem ?

Option 1: Add WYSIWYG functionality for product description text field
Doesnā€™t seem any other option appearsā€¦ ?

Selection of a feature candidate

Option 1 is our feature candidate.

T-shirt size of our selected feature candidate

XS

Metrics to measure if need is satisfied after feature is implemented

Customers are aware about this feature and at least one do use it to communicate about their products.

Feature owners

TBD

Epic/projet where you can follow implementation

TBD


Connected wishlist and discovery discussions*

Nice @tschumilas.
I think this is a good idea and the problem is clearly defined enough (to my mind) to move to ā€˜Voting Candidatesā€™ :slight_smile:

@MyriamBoure - move to voting candidates? or do we need more clarity yet?

Great @tschumilas ! I just put it into the wishlist template (it was on main category but not on sub categories, now it is as default when you open a new thread). I think thought we should reduce the scope to make WYSIWYG functionality to work in product description text field. ā€œall user text inputsā€ is unprecise IMO, and not sure we need it everywhere, so letā€™s scope the feature to the identify need. Else we need to list precisely which text input field we want to add WYSIWYH functionality. So I propose to rename ā€œAdd WYSIWYG functionality to product description fieldā€.
We need a dev to confirm it is S, or even XS, I reckon that, maybe @lin_d_hop will know ?

1 Like

@tschumilas I renamed given the previous discussion the title describing the need, and we have the inception already done, so the feature candidate would be ā€œadd WYSIWYG functionality to product description fieldā€. Letā€™s prioritize if we think it is a priority so we can incept (already done here, just need to confirm T-shirt size) and then move forward.

My estimate would be:
Feature Candidates:

  1. Use WYSIWYG as per enterprise description - XS
  2. Use some other method of doing this - unknown.

yes, should be XS. we need to re-use the logic being used in the enterprise description.

Teresa:
Hi. Is this project going forward?

@miguelnovik - I believe product description fields (at least in version 2.1 ? - now have the potential for hyperlinks (although I think there is a little bug in this - have to try it out more to be sure.)

@tschumilas you are right, this is now possible since the latest release. Iā€™m moving this topic to ā€œdoneā€, but if it does not fulfill the need feel free to open another wishlist (or a bug in github if you saw something not working).