emory-libraries/web-enhance

Create departmental contacts

Opened this issue · 4 comments

Is your feature request related to new functionality not yet included in the product? Please describe.
Several departments are staffed by multiple people and need to be able to advertise their departmental contact info throughout the site, rather than a single individual's contact info. Even in departments that are primarily staffed by a single person, like Course Reserves, we prefer to have patrons contact a departmental email address rather than an individual's email address to maintain a historical account of emails and to assist with vacations, illnesses, and staff turnover. Could we add a departmental contact type, in addition to the existing individual contacts? These could be used to populate the Office & Department Contacts page (https://libraries.emory.edu/woodruff/contact/office-and-department-contacts) and as free-standing cards throughout the site (like on the ILL contact page).

Describe the solution you'd like
Add departmental contact cards/pages in addition to individual contact pages. These could be updated once and populate out to wherever they're linked/embedded in the site. Potential content to collect: department name, email address, phone number, location, URL (could be used for LibCal bookings for the entire department, or the Ask a Librarian form, or whatever URL was relevant to the team), and description.

Describe alternatives you've considered

  1. Another option that may not work for as many teams, but would meet the needs of ILL & Reserves: allow individual contact pages to list two sets of contact info -- their individual info, and their departmental info. Then, for the "Content reference card" component type, allow users to select either the individual or departmental display.
  2. Status quo: Currently, all departmental contact info is entered manually throughout the site, and any changes must be made in all locations that mention the department or team.

How will this impact users?
This would make it easier to keep departmental info current and to use contact cards more liberally throughout the site.

Work for this sounds like a new content type, and some way of displaying it. Content generation for the new type would be dependent on the departments.

to start, create a new content type for departmental contacts.

If we create views for individual departments this ticket will take longer.

@cwbragg What would work best for you?

Hmm, how about starting with the content type and I could create a second enhancement ticket for the views?

CB987 commented

progress report: I've created a new "Department" content type on my local, on github on the branch we019-department-contacts.