Live sites

Some requests are not for documents at all. A landing page, a dashboard, a tip calculator, a habit tracker, a poll, a sign-up sheet for the team offsite: what you want there is a page people can open and click. For those, Rally builds a small website, puts it on the internet, and gives it its own web address. It does not paste a screenful of code into the chat and wish you luck.

These are live sites, and they are artifacts like any other. They sit in the Channel's Artifacts list, they keep their versions, and you change them by asking.

Asking for a site#

Describe the page or tool you want in the Channel. A few examples:

• "Make a landing page for our bake sale, with the date, the place and a menu."
• "Build a simple dashboard that shows the numbers in this spreadsheet as charts."
• "Make a sign-up sheet for the offsite where people add their name and dietary needs."
• "Make a poll for where we go for the team lunch."

Rally builds the site on its private computer (the Terminal, from Code, data and the Terminal), publishes it, and posts a card in the conversation labelled Site.

A site can be one of three things, and Rally picks from what you asked for:

• A plain page that looks the same for everyone, like the bake-sale page.
• A page with some logic behind it, which works things out when someone visits.
• A page that remembers things, like the sign-up sheet or the poll, where visitors add entries and the site keeps them in its own small database.

Changing a site#

Ask for changes in the same Channel: "make the button green", "add a field for t-shirt size". Rally updates the same site, and it stays at the same address, so a link you already sent keeps working and shows the new version.

A request for a new thing makes a new site at a new address, even if it looks a lot like an existing one.

Looking at a site inside Rally#

Click the Site card to open the site view, which shows the live page itself. Its header has these buttons:

• Stored data, only on sites that remember things (below).
• Open in a new window, which gives the site its own window, handy for a dashboard on a second monitor. The window behaves as described in Opening, docking and downloading.
• Copy public link, which copies the site's address.
• Open in browser, which opens the site in your usual web browser.

You can also dock a site beside the conversation with Open in a righthand sidebar, the same way you dock a document.

While the site loads you see Opening…. If it cannot load, Rally says This site could not be opened, with the reason underneath.

In the web browser version of Rally, the live page cannot be shown inside Rally itself, so the site view says Preview unavailable here and suggests opening it in your browser with Open in browser.

Seeing what visitors submitted#

A site that remembers things, such as a poll or a sign-up sheet, has a Stored data button (a database icon) in its header. Click it to swap the page for a table of everything visitors have saved. The button stays pressed while the table is showing; click it again to go back to the page.

• If the site keeps more than one table, switch between them with the buttons along the top. Hover one to see how many rows it has.
• Empty cells show a dash.
• Copy as CSV copies the table so you can paste it into a spreadsheet.
• The table is read-only.

While the table loads you see Reading…. Before anyone has submitted anything, the view says No data yet and Nothing has been submitted yet. If it cannot read the data, it says Data unavailable and Could not read this site's data.

Sharing a site, and who can see it#

Every site has a public web address made of four ordinary words, ending in rallyusercontent.com. Copy public link puts it on your clipboard, ready to paste into an email, a chat or a slide.

Some more detail on access:

• Visitors can read a public site. They cannot change it.
• If a site must be private, say so when you ask for it, for example "make this sign-up sheet only open to people in our Rally Organization". Rally then builds a site that checks who is visiting and turns away anyone who is not signed in to Rally. A plain page that looks the same for everyone cannot be made private.
• The public address always shows the latest version. Earlier versions are only visible inside Rally, and they show the page as it was, never live data.
• Open in browser and Open in a new window sign you in to the site as yourself for that visit. That sign-in lasts 24 hours. Use the buttons each time rather than reusing an address from your browser's history, because the sign-in part of that address only works once and expires within a minute.
• People you have invited into a Channel as guests (see Sharing with people outside your Organization) can open a site that is part of what was shared with them.

Limits#

• Each published version of a site can be at most about 25 MB. That is a lot of web page, unless your bake sale has an ambitious photo gallery.
• Rally does not paste a site's code into the chat. The site is the answer.

Next: the other half of the shelf, things that come in from outside, in Resources: things you bring in.