Show brief event descriptions or excerpts on the homepage

[BenDMyers]

Currently, every event card on the homepage has the event's title, date, and link. What the cards don't have is brief descriptions of the event. We should add brief, 1 or 2-sentence descriptions to the cards, so people have a good idea of what to expect when they follow the link to learn more.

The big question I'll leave open is how do we supply the description? Should we use the Eleventy/gray-matter built-in excerpt processing? Should event creators supply a description property in the event's frontmatter? If so, should descriptions be required?

I'm leaving these questions open-ended. If you choose to pick this issue up, feel free to implement this in whichever way makes the most sense for you. As always, I'm open for questions, or if you need someone to bounce ideas off of.

[chantastic]

whoa! excerpt processing looks cool. love how they implemented it with a comment.

this overlaps with our open-graph/SEO/social-card efforts.
a description would be a nice required element.

could we add a cascade?
frontmatter description > annotated excerpt > fixed character slice of content

[BenDMyers]

Bumping this, since I think the lack of descriptions is making some cards look really empty, especially compared to cards with longer event titles and/or more speakers.

[chantastic]

Agreed. I'm going to add this to an event for June.