Add Task Type field to Contributor Tasks for better filtering

Add link to meeting where we discussed this need

That's an interesting idea. I'm retitling this issue so we can think about the end goal rather than the specifics of how to attain it.

So... to expand on this idea... let's think. One role could be something like "Someone with a few minutes occasionally", and we could list on that role all the tasks that are appropriate for someone like that? That would require more work for us in managing the Contributor Guide, but perhaps would be better in the long run.

If we went that route, then I think we would want to get rid of the "find a task" page entirely as an entry point to the Contributor Guide, and have people enter via skills or roles. Maybe?

For me as a maintainer of the Contributor Guide, I have been using the Find a task page to figure out which task others have written recently that need to be reviewed. So I think we'd still want the page to be there as a management page, but maybe we would put it elsewhere in the menu/nav system and not highlight it as a route for people to start contributing.

Well, there are several ideas floating around for this... So I played around with it on a dev site and implemented one possible way to accomplish the goal of this issue.

What I did:

a) Added a (required, single-valued) field to the Contributor Task content type called "Task type". Currently the allowed values are "Anytime task", "Event planning task", and "At-event task". Help text on the Contributor Task editing page says if it can be both event-related and anytime, choose anytime. Example: a lot of tasks can be done by contributors at a mentored contribution event, but they can also be done by individuals at any time. As another note, we have a way to associate Roles with Tasks, so if there's a role like "Mentoring coordinator" associated with event planning, that role could still reference tasks that are marked as Anytime.

Note: I edited a few of our existing tasks and arbitrarily assigned them a task type on the dev site, for illustration purposes. So don't think that the task types displayed on the dev site are representative of what they should be -- I think all of our existing tasks are Anytime right now. This whole issue came up because we want to add more tasks that are associated with event planning or at-event tasks but still wanted random contributors to be able to search for tasks.

b) This field is displayed in the sidebar of an individual Contributor Task page near the top. Sample page:
https://contribguide-drupal.dev.devdrupal.org/community/contributor-guid...
(on the dev site, enter drupal/drupal for the uname/pwd to access the site)

c) On the Find a Task page, there is now a filter for Task type that defaults to only showing the "Anytime task" type. Also, the tasks shown in the list below now display the task type.
https://contribguide-drupal.dev.devdrupal.org/community/contributor-guid...
(on the dev site, enter drupal/drupal for the uname/pwd to access the site)

d) You can log in to the dev site as Drupal user bacon, password bacon, if you want to try out the editing form. Then go to
https://contribguide-drupal.dev.devdrupal.org/node/add/contributor-task

So.... What do you think?

Regarding the relationship between tasks and issues... One thing we have done in the past is to use the Novice Tasks issue summary template to link issues to detailed task writeups (these are linking into still the old Contributor Tasks but should be eventually migrated into the new contributor guide):
https://www.drupal.org/docs/develop/issues/fields-and-other-parts-of-an-...

Those are one-way links (from an issue out to the writeups on the tasks that need to be done).

It seems like we could also add a "Tasks to do" reference field on the Issue, which would let you select from Contributor Task items, and then have a view on a Task page that shows related open issues.

Good thought! I really like this idea, because often if you find a task, the first step is to find an issue where you can put it in action, and this would probably help if issues had those links.

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Regarding the other suggestion about linking Documentation Page/Guide pages with Tasks... Just thinking this through...

We already have a way to designate an Area for Contributor Roles and Tasks, and via views, these links between Roles-Areas and Tasks-Areas are bidirectional, so that if you go to the Area page, you get a list of related Tasks and Roles. See
https://www.drupal.org/community/contributor-guide/contribution-areas/me...
for an example of an area that has several of these listed.

We also have links between Roles, Tasks, and Skills, all of which are backed up by fields/views so the links are effectively bi-directional (tasks show roles that use them, skills show roles and tasks, etc.).

We do also have a way to designate that a given Task has background info (a reference field for Documentation Guide and Documentation Page). These links are not currently bidirectional. However, we could easily make them bidirectional by adding a view that would be placed in the sidebar (or bottom?) of a Documentation Guide or Page, which would list the Tasks that reference this page as Background Information. That sounds like a good idea!

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So, should we add one or both of these ideas to this issue? They are both easy to implement and I think they're both great ideas!!

Thanks for the feedback!

I implemented it as a List/Text field with fixed values (can be changed via patch in drupalorg module feature). I'm wondering if that is good or we should implement it as a taxonomy... As a note, the documentation status field on docs page/guide pages seems to be a List/Text field and not a taxonomy as it was on Book pages. (Also as a note, unfortunately, that field is really two separate fields on the two content types for some reason, which makes it hard for Views, sigh.)

I've exported the feature that has the updates to the content type and the views for this issue. Here's a patch.

I'm going to work on something else on the dev site now, but it shouldn't intersect with this issue.

I thought about the tasks we have and want to create, and came up with some additional task Types. You can see the list as filters on
https://contribguide-drupal.dev.devdrupal.org/community/contributor-guid...
(I haven't chosen a value for all the tasks listed on the dev site, but most of them should be Anytime)

Here's the current list:
Anytime task
For experienced contributors
For specific role
Event planning task
At-event volunteer task
Temporary task

Thoughts?

Updating issue summary and title with current resolution idea and review instructions.

Also here is a new patch file that has the updates to the Contributor Task content type and view. I also added in one small change, a new default value for the Detailed Steps field from #3196204: Contributor Tasks need way to specify prerequisites (that was a small change so I hope it's OK to combine it into this patch for easier deployment).