Simplified Workflow Centric UI (Attempt 3)

[jmchilton]

A large group of us outlined the idea in details years ago in http://bit.ly/simplified-workflow-ui. The idea was brought up and highlighted by @bwlang again during this year's GCC panel. The document walks through a bunch of choices and options and outlines why histories and uploads are not required. This PR is my latest landing attempt for a simplified workflow-centric interface to Galaxy. The page show the workflows available to the users and allow access to invocations. Since the original idea we've added a customizable activity bar, per-subdomain client side configuration options, and vastly improved the workflow invocation view so this idea should be stronger than ever and less disruptive to implement.

Previous attempts at #9030 and #9109 are probably not interesting but xref-ing. This attempt builds on top of @guerler's latest Masthead work in #17927.

The screenshot of the new landing is:

The two relevant config options are:

• client_mode: 'workflow_runner' (or workflow_centric)
• simplified_workflow_landing_initial_filter_text: 'tag:iwc'

These options can both be set on a per subdomain basis so we could create iwc.usegalaxy.org with all the published IWC workflows available and easily runnable. The filter text is configurable so other sites could filter by username in addition to tags for instance. This idea isn't just to highlight IWC workflows - we've seen projects with comparable ideas built on top of Galaxy like this (e.g. Galaksio, Refinery, etc..) for years and well before we had an IWC.

A note on workflow_runner vs workflow_centric

Projects like Galaksio were explicitly created to only allow specific workflows to be run. The is mode I'm aiming to implement with workflow_runner. This mode disables a bunch of workflow management features (importing, seeing your workflows, editing workflows) that we should have a modality for but probably isn't what we want for a more typical Galaxy - where editing and sharing workflows are important activities we want to encourage. For this I've implemented a second client mode called workflow_centric.

How to test the changes?

(Select all options that apply)

• Instructions for manual testing are as follows:
  1. Set those config options and try it out.

License

• I agree to license these and all my past contributions to the core galaxy codebase under the MIT license.

[bwlang]

I think this is a great step in the right direction for finding workflows.

I'd like to propose a minimalist workflow landing page as a further simplification on the ramp from
discovery of a workflow as introduction to galaxy - > using galaxy to run other workflows -> working with all the galaxy features to do further scientific goals.

I suspect the work to implement something like

this illustration belongs in a different PR, but maybe good to have it linked here.

[bwlang]

glad to see you getting a start on this! let me know if I can help!