Sounds like a use case to add to make metadata visible in content-like views?

this is certainly the kind of thing that we'd want to support in modules, but I'd want to see it in use before making it default behavior.

There are lots of things that have come up as things we'd want immediate visual indicators for: public v private, type, editors, and many different variants of "status" depending upon the use case (ticket status, published v not, moderated, approved, etc). As we increasingly improve and elevate titled and labeled views while downplaying open and closed views, we are getting to the point where the default card views show three and only three things: name, content, and the gear (where the gear is the window to the rest).

Your suggestion is only the tinyest of steps away from this (a tweak to the gear icon), and as such I think it will be a terrific solution for dealing with the use cases above. Eg, in some sites where the public/private distinction is key, it might make a great solution there. Other sites might want to emphasize the presence of a discussion, as you mention.

The good news: this would be an extremely simple pack to write. There is a "menu_link" view that is called by the menu view. Here is the entire view, as it stands:

  view :menu_link do |args|
    '<a class="ui-icon ui-icon-gear"></a>'
  end

It would be trivial to alter that to use different icons according to different card qualities.

As with many patterns, we don't want to close the door to making these things wagneerable. But adding wagneering interface involves a lot more design, and my personal preference will generally be to play with things as packs first and work towards wagneerability when functionality has been proven desirable.

Yes, exactly. Maybe Wagneerable is stronger than I'm thinking of it as. I just mean that site-admins can make the choice fairly easily, and that's more or less how you responded.