We’ve (finally!) started working on Home Page that will contain some valuable content for newcomers and useful widgets for all people, like
If you can think of some useful widget you need — let us know.
Share any things that will make Home Page useful for you as well.
That’s interesting.
I was thinking for a while that it would be nice to have some sort of dashboard, such as per project, which could then embed reports with time spent, a list of issues, progress for the current sprint, etc
As for the home page … I’m not sure yet, but as an admin I would like to option to configure this somehow for team members, so they all start with good defaults.
For example right now we rely on a smart folder per team member, where we can show for each team member
My Tasks would be great.
My Tasks ⊆ My Entities
Can’t wait to see this!
Glad you mentioned watchlist, that’s a great, under-appreciated and very good example of some of the cool UX stuff you guys are capable of. Big vote for including it, and also a plug for my feature request about some improvements to it:
Also would love to get some date-specific activity on the Home page. My vote is for something comment-centric. The reason for this is we use comments a ton, basically to update work. So if you could have a stream of comments, ideally having BOTH entities that received comments, and that were referred to in comments, something like:
@ 4:23 pm Jim commented on #456 Take out the Trash - “Sorry it snowed today and the service didn’t make it, will get it done tomorrow”
@4:45 pm Dolly referenced #321 Weekly content Calendar via #456 Take out the Trash - “That’s OK, with your extra time can you finally wrap up #321 ‘Weekly Content Calendar’ which was due last month?”
Hope that’s useful and eager to see what you guys come up with!
Yes all kinds of updates would be great in the Home Page!
I think it would be great to have such Dashboard / Control Panel (of which Home Page is just way to use it) as database entity view configuration, such that we can have multiple dashboards / home pages / control panels,
for users,
for teams,
for visitors,
for each of my personal profiles,
etc.
and thats its well integrated as a database feature rather than an isolated functionality.
For example, you could see this as:
Just making sure users can apply the solution in a more flexible way.
So we can still have Dasboard ‘Templates’ like a Home Page out of the box of course.
Nice! Excited for this 
First couple of ideas…
Ability to use “columns” where widgets/views can be embedded. Then, we can use “full-width” and maximize use of the space.
Consider a “[Workspace | Personal]” switch view so that team members can create their own Home page, just like with the Sidebar.
Would be good if I can embed any view or report into this. Especially reports I might want to compile for myself. 
I believe that all fans of an admin-centric approach would appreciate the ability to customize this page for all users 
For example, by adding sections with useful links, guides on how to work within the organization, important announcements, and similar resources.
I learnt a little trick from @helloitse of using you own user’s entity as the home page / dashboard. This is what I’ve been recommending to and building for people. This keeps things within the Fibery Model, without adding more unrelated artefacts.
This works really well, as you can show or hide all the things related to that user. Its already a prebuilt “My Entities” widgets, which the admin can go in and set which entities to show, in what way, etc.
The down side of this is that only admins can edit the layout and configure the views of the user entity. What we did was make a blank user entity with just a rich text field, and then explained to them how to make embedded views in rich text. This kind of works, and the admin can go in and make it per user, but its a bit clunky.
The Idea (not just for home): User-Configurable Entity Views
Maybe the ability to make some entity views configurable by all users, such that each user has their own. This is a switch that admins/creators can turn on. This would feel to me like the most elegant solution of a Home page within the current ecosystem.
Bonus points if admins/creators could still see how each user has theirs set up and copy from one user to another.
What Could Users Configure?
When it comes to hiding and reording fields, this wouldn’t be too tricky i think, but if we want to allow users to CONFIGURE the to-many relations, maybe things get too much there. Maybe then they just make an embedded view.
But to be fair, in the current proposed home, its also just hide/show and reorder for members, so it might work!
How Would This Work in Practice?
So per entity view you could have a toggle. “Allow users to configure for themselves”
Then admins/creators can see the “template view” which is what everyone starts with, as well as their own user configuration. Any changes they make in their own config is only visible to them, and then in the template view, they have the option to “push changes to all users” or on specific fields “Hide field for all” or “Show field for all”. Some kind of difference between updating template for new users vs updating the view for existing users.
What About Announcements?
Then the way to make an “Announcements” would be to make a relation to a manager. And then the manager could have a field for “Announcement for those below” or smt like that. And then everyone gets a message pulled from their manager with lookup, so its read only.
If you wanted to do company level announcements with this, it could just be as simple as adding a formula field with a certain text, then everyone gets that text in their entity. But then you also need mechanism to ensure / push fields to show on all user-configured views.
The Potential
In combination with this, it could make for a very powerful home page, where you could structurally show things that are not directly related to the current user, within the current Fibery Model.
Long story short: More stuff to entity view → use “current user” entity view as the home page.
EDIT:
Just thought of one more solution, which is kinda similar but not really. Where instead of “allow user to to configure their own”, its “allow each entity to have a different layout”. Then in the context of users, each user can make their own layout for their own user entity, but when they go to someone elses entity they will see that user’s configuration. Down side is that if we take this to things that are not the user database, i don’t know how useful it is… feels less useful.
Could not agree with this more. It will be a huge missed opportunity if the module/widget concept is only applicable to a special homepage and not something that can be used to better customize entity views/layouts everywhere else in Fibery.
The scope of these things are very different. In the future we will add Dashboard view that will serve these needs, so far we want to focus on first-user experience and “Where is my work?” problem.
Also agree with this, we too are having to resort to creating a homepage document for each of our departments with links off to the pages they need and asking them to bookmark the URL of that doc. Much of the feedback from our team is that the sidebar is difficult to navigate when you have multiple spaces. Expanding and collapsing can leave you lost in the tree structure. The new Workspace/Personal part of the sidebar doesn’t seem to help either much as you then have two different trees to navigate within which almost feels like it makes it even more complicated — even more so when you have multiple header sections within the Personal Tree for Private and Favourites. It feels far easier just to have a single doc/homepage where you can just jump into the views you need. Really looking forward to this feature 
I hope I’m not side-tracking the discussion too much but I agree that the navigation can be overwhelming and while the Personal tab is a good idea, in practice it has has some critical limitations.
For example it keeps showing up these zombie views which I can’t seem to get rid of
Here is how the same folder looks in the Workspace and Personal tab, side by side
If you delete the views (that are showing in the Personal section) then the problem should not reoccur. There was an issue with context views being shown even when they had been removed from the smart folder, but it should be fixed.
Personally, i’d LOVE the ability to add buttons that trigger either A) automations, or B) create new entities (of a specific type). This can help foreground those tasks that occur most frequently, which I would identify as 1) surfacing entities, 2) navigating to common entities, and 3) creating new entities of a specific common type
For things like this homepage, I think Coda (for all its flaws) gets a lot of things right.
+1 for adding buttons to homepage – I’d especially like to be able to do things from the button that aren’t necessarily tied to the specific entity. For example, when I click a button, generate a first thing in database X, and a second thing in (non-‘related’) database Y. This can be super-helpful in automation. Right now I have to fake it by creating yet another relation that just confuses things just so I can access another database from a button.
I’ve set up something similar in Notion (I create a page for every member, with views filtering to their teams etc.); however this is just a normal page with no formal link to the user record.
