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The best widget for listing content that is updated when there's activity on the content?

Christopher G. Stanton

Aside from the activity stream, is there an alternative widget that is simple in its presentation?

For example, I want to be able to list blogs, like this:

  • Blog 3: Here's a title
  • Blog 2: Here's another title
  • Blog 1: Here's yet another title

Now, imagine that someone edits blog 1, I want the order to shuffle so that the one with the most recent activity is at the top of the list:

  • Blog 1: Here's yet another title
  • Blog 3: Here's a title
  • Blog 2: Here's another title

Now, let's say that someone creates a new blog, and then someone comments on Blog 3, that should be considered an update to activity, I would expect that the list would update like this:

  • Blog 3: Here's a title
  • Blog 4: Here's a newer title
  • Blog 1: Here's another title
  • Blog 2: Here's yet another title

This is very much how our members use and perceive content on the Community. They expect 'new' content to pop up to the top, and then content which has been engaged with to also 'pop' up to the top of the stack. At present it appears a lot of the widgets list content as it's created, and then hope that people interested in it would know it exists, and enable notifications for it, but that fatigues them and their inboxes, they spend more time managing their visibility rather than being able to look on a page.

What would a suitable widget for listing content like this be? Is there an existing widget which I can simply configure to do this?

Can I also use that widget for other content types, such as Forum threads, Articles and Wiki Documents? In the eyes of a user, all content is content and should behave the same or similarly.

If a suggested solution is to make a 'custom widget' to do this, what APIs can this rely on (especially where comments also come into it), and what attributes of content can be relied on to do this accurately or need to be compensated for? 



Amended queries
[edited by: Christopher G. Stanton at 3:03 PM (GMT 0) on Wed, Nov 22 2023]
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  • 0

    Hi Chris 

    Can't help re the widget but do you really want to elevate blog content as being 'latest activity' if it's edited? Even if the edit was just a spelling mistake that has been noticed a couple of months down the line? 

    In my mind blog posts should not need to be edited i.e. fundamentally changed enough for it to be elevated in an activity list. If you have content that is regularly updated then that should be hosted as an 'article' in the community not a blog post?

    If someone has commented on a blog post then yes that should trigger it to be elevated in a recent activity feed but again I don't think an 'edit' should do that? 

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  • 0

    Hi Chris 

    Can't help re the widget but do you really want to elevate blog content as being 'latest activity' if it's edited? Even if the edit was just a spelling mistake that has been noticed a couple of months down the line? 

    In my mind blog posts should not need to be edited i.e. fundamentally changed enough for it to be elevated in an activity list. If you have content that is regularly updated then that should be hosted as an 'article' in the community not a blog post?

    If someone has commented on a blog post then yes that should trigger it to be elevated in a recent activity feed but again I don't think an 'edit' should do that? 

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  • 0 in reply to LisaM
    LisaM said:
    Can't help re the widget but do you really want to elevate blog content as being 'latest activity' if it's edited? Even if the edit was just a spelling mistake that has been noticed a couple of months down the line? 

    Fundamentally, yes, unless you manually override the last modified/published date of the blog post, which you can effectively do by changing the 'published date' in Verint. Verint should allow more control over such things, at the very least by administrators. We have so many scenarios where we do need to go back and edit content and want to suppress notifications or not have it come back to the top of the stack, that in some content we have that capability via the API.

    From a user's perspective, editing the content triggers the "something has changed about this, and you may want to investigate it". That's the line of thought and reasoning behind our members wanting and expecting the content to behave that way.

    Often our members also re-edit and update the same blog post, because they're posting about a project and they're making progress on that project. They don't want to end up with 5 to 10 different blog posts about the same topic when they're making progress on what can be considered "the same thing". So they want edits and changes to that content to be visible to others and to notify them of those changes, and one of those methods is to 'pop' the content back onto the top of the stack.

    Community staff may also want to edit content to send a clear signal that something has ended, say a competition or giveaway, and to come back to that same content to highlight that it's changed and to celebrate the winners or see who has won.

  • 0 in reply to Christopher G. Stanton
    Christopher G. Stanton said:
    Often our members also re-edit and update the same blog post, because they're posting about a project and they're making progress on that project. They don't want to end up with 5 to 10 different blog posts about the same topic when they're making progress on what can be considered "the same thing". So they want edits and changes to that content to be visible to others and to notify them of those changes, and one of those methods is to 'pop' the content back onto the top of the stack.

    Maybe consider using the Articles / Wiki feature for that type of activity instead? So they can choose to send a notification or not depending on the nature of the update? 

    It seems to be the type of content that is perfect for articles rather than blogs? 

  • 0 in reply to LisaM
    LisaM said:

    Maybe consider using the Articles / Wiki feature for that type of activity instead? So they can choose to send a notification or not depending on the nature of the update? 

    It seems to be the type of content that is perfect for articles rather than blogs?

    There are a few considerations here, as this is an issue we are addressing generally across content types, a blog post was used as an example:

    1. People are used to and familiar with the vernacular of a 'blog' and what a 'blog' is.

    2. Blogs perform better for SEO in general because search engines recognise what 'blogs' are, you can put a title graphic which translates into an og: image, which search engines and social media use, and you can specifically set the title and meta description

    3. This doesn't necessarily address that the majority of existing content is already in a 'blog' format on our platform. Changing that is a huge upheaval to backlinks and external links.

    4. People still need to opt into notifications manually, and they may not want to.

    5. It shows that a site is active if content lists respond to activity for a person who visits it.

    6. This problem isn't entirely related to blogs, it's also related to other content types where there is activity on it, and not all content is suitable to be an article.

    7. If you're listing articles in a listing widget, you're likely to have the same problem that it doesn't reflect recent activity on it as to its sort order in the list stack.

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