User welcome or landing pages

[choldgraf]

Context

There are many cases where a community wants to have a central place to provide information, updates, links, etc to their users. For example:

• Workshops might want to provide updated schedules or links to zoom rooms
• Persistent groups might want to provide announcements and information about upcoming changes or dates
• Communities might want a more configurable / user-friendly place to provide community-level information (think pangeo.io except built into the hub somehow).

In each of these cases, there's value in making that information "obvious" to users by putting it in front of their eyes often and by default. A natural time to do this is is after a log-in, and with a readily-accessible button or link that is always present.

Proposal

We should create a way to define a welcome or landing page that satisfies the criteria described above. This could be something like:

• a local file (e.g., if a welcome.md file exists, then automatically open it on any new log-in attempt)
• an embed of a local or external website (e.g., embed hub.2i2c.cloud/my-jupyter-book/intro.html or foo.xyz.com in an iframe)

In addition, the link to this file / website could be special-cased so that there was a prominent button in the JupyterLab interface that would take them there (maybe even a launcher icon?)

Updates and actions

References

• A presentation that notes welcome.md was useful
• Neurohackademy hub #1507 included some discussion of this from @arokem
• Also related to Authenticated and optionally private static websites served from a hub #1500

[jmunroe]

A welcome.md is a good start (opened upon new log-in if it exists). We could include one by default that includes instructions on the immediate next steps to complete a community is first setting up a hub for their users.

Relatedly, "starter" documentation and material are important to provide such as providing a default set of notebooks (a Quickstart.ipynb or something) but that is probably beyond the scope of this issue.

[choldgraf]

@jmunroe I think you make a good point that something relatively minimal (like "auto-open welcome.md if it exists") is probably a good way to get a majority of the benefit without a lot of extra complexity like embedding IFrames and Jupyter Books and such :-)

I feel like this is somewhat related to the issue around automatically git-pulling a repository on session launch, since that could be one way to grab the latest versions of a welcome.md style document:

• Automatically run script to clone a git repo on user server startup #1536