What’s New?
Delib done a lot of work on how consultation URLs are created and handled, as well as squashing bugs which focused particularly on accessibility issues this month. Alongside these visible improvements, time was invested in increasing Delib’s automated testing capacity. This means we can find and fix bugs and errors more efficiently.
Creating your consultation URL
When you create a consultation in Citizen Space, the first two things you need to decide are the consultation title and the URL (the website link). The URL will be made up of:
https:// + [your Citizen Space domain name] + [department name] + [editable consultation name] As consultation titles may need to be quite long, you can edit the final part of the URL – we previously referred to this as the ‘pathname’ – so you can keep it short and shareable (although we’d recommend it has some correlation with the title). The Department name will always be included within the URL.
It became apparent (through support requests and by reviewing old consultation URLs) that the way Citizen Space presented this was confusing for some. Here’s how it used to look*:
In this release, we’ve improved how this page is presented. The most notable changes are:
- We moved ‘Select Department’ up*, so it’s already visible in your Consultation URL when you’re deciding what the pathname will be.
- When you enter your consultation title, it will automatically update in the URL (you can still edit this should the full title be too lengthy).
- The URL field on the ‘Add Consultation’ page is now highlighted in yellow, instead of in red text.
And here’s how it looks now*:
* The ‘Select Department’ drop down visible in the ‘Before’ and ‘After’ screenshots will only be visible to Site Administrators.
Editing your consultation URL
Now you can also edit the final part of a consultation URL a consultation has been created, on the Edit Consultation Details page (previously, once you’d hit ‘Add Consultation’ there was no going back). In these cases, the old URL will continue to redirect people to the new URL, so you won’t run into problems if the link has already been shared.
However, there are a couple of exceptions here:
- You will not be able to edit the URL of an online survey consultation whilst it is open (not even by retracting it) as anyone in the process of responding might lose their data.
- You cannot edit the URL of a private consultation. When you make a consultation private, the URL automatically becomes alpha-numeric so that it can only be accessed by people who are given the link (and not found in searches, or guessed