"Tool bar" or "Dashboard" for addons

[humitos]

We have been talking about a way, as a reader, to Enable/Disable addons. There are situations where it would be pretty useful to disable doc-diff, for example.

I'd like to propose to decouple this interaction from the flyout if possible ¹. Right now, the flyout serves its own purpose showing published versions, offline format links and others.

I was thinking we probably want something more similar to "Django Debug Toolbar" for this purpose:

Collapsed	Expanded

Note that something simple like this could already serve our own purpose as well, since we could activate/de-activate addons via checkboxes, similar to what "Django Debug Toolbar" does. We could do a PoC creating a <readthedocs-toolbar> element with some simple checkboxes and see how it goes.

Also, besides Enable/Disable addons, what other UX components this toolbar/dashboard could be useful for?

In any case, I'm opening this issue here to start collecting ideas that people may already have, discuss them, and build a quick PoC that we can start testing out.

Footnotes

1. Maybe, what we need here is to re-think the flyout completely again and re-design it 🤔 . However, that will take a lot more time than a PoC, I'd guess 😄 ↩

[humitos]

There are other features we have talked about some time about that are not "Enable/Disable" things that we could consider adding here as well. I just found that we talked about "Share this page" link on RTD4B that automatically generates a secret link to that page: https://github.com/readthedocs/readthedocs-corporate/issues/189

[humitos]

After talking with Eric at PyCon and thinking more about this, I'm imagining there is going to be a new flyout completely redesigned that will host all these addons.

Similar to what we currently have, but not natively integrated with the theme, always visible and showing only the Read the Docs logo when collapsed ¹. I think this are key properties that Read the Docs should provide as a hosting platform so all the readers have exact the same experience when surfing documentation at Read the Docs.

Even if authors integrate our addons in a "better way", we will still always provide our own flyout because the user will find all the addons there and it will always look the same -- no matter what's the theme/doctool the original author is using to build their site. This is a vague example of what I'm thinking about:

Flyout bottom right	Flyout right

Considering there is pretty common to have 3-columns themes and different layouts, we should allow some type of configuration to decide what's the position of this widget: top-left, top-right, bottom-left, bottom-right and similar ones that will look better depending on theme itself.

Footnotes

1. no version will be shown there (e.g. v:stable) -- that's an integration point the theme author should make prominent in the documentation page if they want. ↩

[humitos]

When working on this issue, we need to consider how we want to expose multiple PDFs per version here as well. See readthedocs/readthedocs.org#2045

[ericholscher]

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