Making Ubuntu Software Center an interesting place to visit partly involves making it change in interesting ways over time.
A museum has both permanent and temporary exhibits. A magazine has both permanent columns and one-off features. In the same way, we would like USC to have not just permanent categories and popularity charts, but also temporary features.
These exhibits would be a mixture of two forms: a temporary promotion for an existing individual application, and a collection of applications on a particular theme.
For the banner that would promote either kind of exhibit, I think that we would need:
* an image for the banner
* coordinates for where to present localized text on the banner
* which font and color should be used to present the name of the exhibit.
Exhibits in the form of individual applications would also need a package name. USC would derive the application title from the package name, and use that as the text of the banner.
Exhibits in the form of collections would also need:
* an image for the top of the exhibit screen
* a background color for the remainder of the exhibit screen
* a series of package names
* a localized (!) title for the exhibit as a whole (e.g. "Learn a new language", "Hobbies & Crafts")
* coordinates for where to display that title over top of the background image.
As with these server-side features in general, there would need to be:
1. an interface for the editor to upload/specify this data
2. storage for the data
3. an API for USC to retrieve the data.
QA Notes:
* Go to /exhibits/ - you will not be allowed unless you have the add_exhibit permission (ask someone to give you that perm)
* Click on "Create a new exhibit"
* Fill in the details (note, you should only be able to include a title if you list multiple package names etc.)
* Once saved, [mvo to update?] view the exhibit(s) using USC trunk.
Just a few questions as I'm going through:
Would the image for either type be the same size, and if not, should either have an enforced size (so that a quality image at set size is uploaded and you're not doing any resizing when displaying etc?).
We could make fields like background colour and the title simply optional. If the title is not present when USC grabs the data, it would just use the title of the first package in the list of packages (which must have a length >= 1) and displays it with the given (pixel?) coordinates.
The other option, would be to present two separate options (perhaps individual and group exhibits?) which enforce which fields are required appropriately.