UMB.FYI gets Profiles, Tags and Topics

Since creating UMB.FYI newsletter a little over a year ago, I’ve slowly been tweaking and adding features as I’ve gone along and today I wanted to share some cool new features that have just landed.

Profile Pages

The new profiles feature allows content creators to setup their own dedicated profile pages on UMB.FYI, displaying a timeline of all their contributions that have featured in UMB.FYI.

Anyone can claim a profile, and to make it as easy as possible this is all powered by a basic profiles.json file found in our GitHub repository. To claim your profile, create a PR to this JSON file adding your details, and it’s as simple as that. You’ll get an instant profile page at https://umb.fyi/@{alias} for you to share.

The other cool thing about profiles is that when UMB.FYI generates a newsletter, if it identifies that an article belongs to a profile, it’ll now add a nice profile link to bottom of the link preview.

Tag Pages

As you might be able tell in the screenshots above, we’ve also introduced tag pages. In future newsletters we’ll start tagging all articles by subject matter and these tags will now show through as links in both the newsletter and across all user profile pages. Clicking through to these tag pages will display a timeline of all newsletter content tagged with that specific tag.

Topic Pages

The last of these new features are topic pages. You can think of topic pages like “super tags”. We group tags of a similar nature together and display a timeline of all content that belongs to those tags all on one page. This makes it super useful to be able to read through all content on a specific topic.

In a similar way to profiles, these topics can also be community contributed to by updating a topics.json file in out GitHub repository. If you think there is a topic we should have a dedicated page for, then submit a PR to this file and it will automatically get a topic page at https://umb.fyi/topic/{alias}.

Wrapping Up

Whilst most of the UMB.FYI site is closed source, with these updates, I’ve tried to make some features that can easily allow community contributions (oh, and hey, our repository even has the #hacktoberfest tag applied so adding your profile counts towards your hacktoberfest contributions). If this approach works, it could be a nice way to open up more features in the future.

I hope to see more of you creating your own profiles, and if you haven’t done already, and if you are looking for a quality source of Umbraco news, then please do subscribe to the UMB.FYI newsletter

Until next time 👋