Improve Releases page metadata
Problem to solve
When sharing links in apps like Slack, Twitter, or Facebook, metadata from the link is often extracted and used to generate nice looking thumbnails/previews. For example, here's what a link to a GitLab issue looks like when shared in Slack:
Notice the preview contains info specific to the issue being shared (title, content, author, assignees).
However, when sharing a Release-related link, the preview only contains the generic project information:
Proposal
Add metadata to all Release pages so that when a link to a Release page is shared (i.e. https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/releases/v12.10.0-ee), the preview shown in Slack or similar apps contains relevant info such as a few lines from the release notes, the release date, the release title, the release creator, any associated milestones, links, etc.
We should enable this for these two pages:
- The main Releases page (i.e. https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/releases)
- Individual Release pages (i.e. https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/releases/v12.10.0-ee)
Intended users
Anyone who uses Releases, but mostly Rachel (Release Manager).
Further details
I think it probably makes the most sense to expose this metadata through Open Graph (og:
) tags.
A handy tool for testing a page's metadata is the Facebook Debugger. For example: https://developers.facebook.com/tools/debug/?q=https%3A%2F%2Fgitlab.com%2Fgitlab-org%2Fgitlab%2F-%2Freleases%2Fv12.10.0-ee.
Permissions and Security
We should only expose information that is already publicly-accessible through the webpage.
Documentation
No documentation is required for this change.