[Component amendment]: Update Article block to support conditional metadata rendering (static & dynamic)

[kim-isaac]

Component/pattern to amend

Article block

related pull request: canonical/ubuntu.com#16161

Context

Metadata within the Article block is defined as optional.

However, based on recent findings:

Dynamic mode: the Latest News module automatically populates metadata because the Article Block always creates the metadata slot.
Static mode: the metadata slot is still rendered even when no metadata is provided, resulting in empty space.

This creates inconsistency between expected behavior (optional metadata) and actual rendering.

Proposal

To address this, update the Article Block to conditionally render metadata is needed:

Dynamic mode: Do not create/render metadata container/slot if metadata is explicitly disabled.
Static mode: Do not render metadata container if no metadata is provided.

[syncronize-issues-to-jira]

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The internal ticket has been created: https://warthogs.atlassian.net/browse/WD-35347.

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[jmuzina]

Article block creates a slot for author & date & Sites' latest-news module automatically populates author and time if present. Because the Blog API always has a date & author for each article, the date & author are always rendered. To make metadata (or, more granularly, author/date) optional we would need a simple change to conditionally render the metadata slot, or the author/time elements here - that way the Latest News module skips populating Author & date.

We would also need to not render metadata in static contents mode if there is no author / date provided, to make sure no excess space is rendered.

Then we would need to update vf_blog and vf_blog_block to enable the template config options to accept an input that does not render the metadata.