Custom dynamic home pages via React components

[lukebarnard1]

A dynamic (React as opposed to HTML in iFrame) home page would allow for a much simpler implementation of an icon to start a chat with welcomeUserId (@RiotBot).

• Use profile API to determine if we can access the user (solves the question of "what if their HS isn't federated with the bot user?"
• Dynamically show the icon depending on the success of getting the profile of the user
• Clicking the button could open any existing DM with RiotBot if there is only 1 or show the ChatCreateOrReuseDialog if there are > 1 or just create a new DM if there are 0 DMs.

[ara4n]

i've remembered that one of my big concerns about the dynamic home page is that i suspect that people will want to edit the HTML of the landing page without building their own Riots.

So i'm actually back considering doing some basic templating on the static page in order to i18nize it - and we'll lose the niceness proposed here :/

[lukebarnard1]

I totally forgot to mention that the welcomePageUrl can override the dynamic page, so you wouldn't lose that even if that default page was dynamic.

[ara4n]

thing is that people will want to tweak the default template

[lampholder]

There seems to be something about this issue that is somehow weirdly complicated to think about, so I'll put my latest understanding here.

To run one's own welcome page post ILAG, admins will have to specify a custom URL in the config file which will require them to run their own instance of Riot. There is currently no other way to specify a custom welcome page.

Therefore, admins who just want to tweak what we have will need their own instance of Riot deployed, so the difference between their manipulating a static HTML page (with some i18n templating) and a dynamic react component is little more than the difference in their technical comfort level with each task.

However, there is a realistic use case where admins want to run their own welcome page by pointing their Riot welcomePageUrl config at an external site; perhaps one already managed through WordPress or some such. Our providing an iframe into which they can configurably drop their own page does have utility to these people.

[lampholder]

All that said, our current thinking is that a dynamic home page will not be part of ILAG, so I'm going to explicitly remove it from this project (and modify the issue name accordingly).

[ara4n]

So far I've seen it be repeatedly useful that the homepage can be tweaked without forking Riot (e.g. for various cryptocurrency Riot deployments). If folks want more sophisticated custom functionality they'll have to fork Riot anyway, at which point they are welcome to replace HomePage with a React component rather than injecting home.html. I don't think we need to proactively do this for them.