Design research: how to model time-based series (state of snowpack, climbing forecast)

[andyanderso]

Let's spend some time researching what's actually needed here across avalanche centers that we're onboarding in the near future.

What we were thinking of building:
We'll add a Page Collections collection that will be very similar to the pattern of Teams and Biographies. We'll then create two blocks that use Page Collections and that should handle most scenarios for grouping more complex and flexible page layouts. We'll also make some changes to Posts based on this request.

• Page collections
  • Two components
    • Table of contents
    • Grid of page links with images
  • Move Pages.meta image to featured images just like we do for Posts

Update 10/16/25

Moved to sub issue #618

• Posts updates
  • SAC wants author to be optional
  • Optional display checkboxes
    • display author (default to false)
    • display date (default to true)
• Pages updates
  • Add a defaultValue for layout -- a single column content block. Maybe a heading too?

Original request

I would like to be able to show collections of items with better layouts than the posts offer.

Right now, we can create groups of posts with tags, but this content type is limited to simple layouts.

I am thinking about the Daily Flow content or other related content pieces.

I could also live with just making the author info not a required field on the posts, and we could keep using posts. This would make sense for news, announcements, and content like the daily flow.

Here are examples:
This is a post. It has the author info required and is just a single-column layout: https://sac.avy-fx.org/blog/introduction
This is the beginning of a page layout with no author info required and lots of flexibility: https://sac.avy-fx.org/alt-intro

[rustynwac]

Hoping we can chat through this with Andy + the team

[andyanderso]

That sounds good. Can I move forward with creating page content, assuming that the collections functionality will come, or should I use posts for now, assuming that the optional author feature will be ready sooner?

[busbyk]

That sounds good. Can I move forward with creating page content, assuming that the collections functionality will come, or should I use posts for now, assuming that the optional author feature will be ready sooner?

I suggest creating content using Pages. These changes should go in at the same time.

For now, you could use:

• For a table of contents: text links that you copy and paste on each page
• For a replacement of the blog list block: temporarily use a few Image Link Grid blocks, Image Text List blocks where the text is a link, or multiple Link Preview components, a list of text links in a content block.

We're targeting this for the Start of 25/26 Season milestone which is due by November 14th.

Will those workarounds work for you for now?

[andyanderso]

Works for me. Thanks!

[rustynwac]

@andyanderso still critical to deliver this ASAP or should we push?