Description:

Develop a homepage plugin that allows platform engineers to pre-configure homepages for different personas, such as developers, data scientist, managers, etc.

Each persona-specific homepage should provide content tailored to their needs.

Additionally, provide users the capability to further personalize their homepages through a WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) interface, enabling them to drag and drop available plugins, resize, and arrange them according to their preferences. Ensure that these customizations are saved for each user, so their personalized homepage persists across sessions.

The new plugin source code will be on the Red Hat Developer GitHub.

Background & Context:

A customizable homepage will enhance user engagement by delivering content relevant to each user’s role and personal preferences. Current limitations do not allow for persona-specific configurations or individual user customizations, which this feature aims to address.

Part of this outcome, we will also work on creating new cards for the homepage, that were requested by customers.

Acceptance Criteria:

1. Platform engineers can configure and deploy persona-specific homepages.
2. Users can only select plugins that they have access to (using RBAC) to add to their homepages.
3. Users can place and resize the plugins on their homepages via drag & drop.
4. User customizations are saved and persist across sessions.
5. When a user logs in. the homepage reflects the correct content based on user roles and personal settings.

Technical note:

Backstage.io has a way to configure the homepage via drag and drop, but there are several limitations. Users can only select plugins from a hardcoded list of plugins, and the data is only persisted in the local browser and not in a database. We have to investigate if we can reuse that work and add the features that we need, or if it's better to start from scratch.