Implement way to include italicized court cases in page titles

[noahmanger]

The standard way to write something like Citizens United v. FEC is to italicize it. When these show up in press release titles, however, we can't currently italicize them. The task here is to update the title field to allow for this sort of formatting.

My proposed solution is to modify the title field of the press_release_page models in Wagtail to allow rich text, but maybe there's a better way?

[ccostino]

@noahmanger: The title field you're referring to, does it always only contain the title and therefore should always be displayed italicized when displayed? Or are we dealing with a field that includes more than just the title of a case itself?

[noahmanger]

The latter. So we need to be able to display a title like:

Something something something Supreme Court rules in Citizens United v. FEC

I don't know that it's possible (or desirable) to make the built-in title field a rich-text field. So one idea I had was to have an optional field that's like rich_title and if that field is present, use that value where the title would go.

[ccostino]

Ah, I see what you mean. Wagtail does provide a RichTextField field type, but I'm not sure that's the way to go for overriding the existing title field type.

Another thought that comes to mind is that there's no easy way to discern the court case in a string of text either, right? For example, let's say the display did support formatting as is right now. How would the court case get italicized in this case? Someone going in and adding the formatting where appropriate?

[noahmanger]

Yeah, I'm afraid there's no way to automatically detect them, given that they have such irregular names.

[ccostino]

That's what I was afraid of and given that notion I'm not sure even a regular expression is worth building to try and parse it out. That'd only be useful if there was some pattern to follow that would match a majority of the time.

Given that, I think you're right in just changing the field to be a rich text field. That will allow someone to modify the text to be formatted properly and we'd then use that for the display. Alternatively you could have a separate field for this like you mentioned, but I'd only go down that route if we needed to preserve the original title as is (and in that case, just copy the entire title into the rich text field and format what you need to, otherwise you run into the problem of figuring out which part of the title to replace with the formatted version).

[noahmanger]

The reason I suggested an additional field is that I'm not sure if Wagtail lets you override the page title field itself. That might need to be a plain string. Though do you see a way to do this?

[ccostino]

Ah right, good point on that - I'd have to look to see!

[noahmanger]

Ok! I think I figured out a decent solution in #621