drupal

Site Development

Body: 

This page collects ideas for improvements on the site.

Overall Design

  • Work up front-page with panel (designobserver-style) (check it)
  • Start pulling in video feeds from YouTube subscriptions into the sidebar.
  • Change header to add more style, increase prominence of the primary links
  • Maybe make DIY Politics more prominent at the top of the page, and specify that Home means Future Majority Home, not the DIY Politics main page.
  • More intelligently/cleanly organize the author/folksonomy/comments stuff at the bottom of posts.
  • How about RSS feeds?
  • Double check Google Analytics
  • Change wiki “Tab” name to DIY Politics <— i prefer “wiki”. or just “DIY”. “DIY Politics” doesn’t sell it. Let’s hash it out on a [[FM Site Navigation Terminology]] page.
  • Add “share” functionality buttons to the blogs and wiki pages - share on FaceBook is probalby the most important, but Digg and Delicious might be worth it too.

Wiki Section

  • Add a panel-based homepage at /wiki (wikipedia-style) (check it)
    • Clean up panel based homepage - less entries for “new” and “popular” with snippets of text from article.
    • Get rid of extraneous columns (author, replies, type, created) in “new” and Popular” blocks.
    • Replace wiki markup reference in “bottom” block with a link to a cheat sheet page and some basic text about how to get started.
  • Add a search function. The organizational structure isn’t holding together well. We need a better way to categorize and find content.
  • We need a way (at least top level administrators) to change the home page. (I’d like to make [[Campus Organizing]] a top level category).
  • Two column format for wiki articles (some old/all new articles are reverting to three column format).
  • Add a “recently edited” block to sidebars on article pages
  • Add a “most popular” block to sidebars on article pages.
  • Add a note in the header that “you are viewing a wiki page, which you can edit. Be bold!”
  • Fix the dang template to get rid of “Body” at the top of every wiki page
  • Maybe we should remove original “authoring” information from each post. This is the type of data that should be displayed in revisions, not on the top of every post.
  • Add image linking to the Markup Reference
  • Registration block on every page of the wiki - people need to know how/where to log-in if they want to edit a page!
  • Home page panels - can we include a design element to separate the different panels - even a thin line splitting the left and right columns and drawing a bottom border to the top panel might work. Everything kind of bleeds together at the moment.
  • Change Copyright to creative commons.
  • It would be nice to have a collapsible site map on a side bar, showing at least the links you followed to get to the section you’re viewing. This would be especially useful for when you’re editing a page and want to get to the parent page directly.

User Accts

  • show “comments” in user pages

i’m not drupal-conversant enough to know if these things are trivial to implement or super-effin’-hairy, but if its not too hard to do:

  • comment / article rating
  • saving drafts

Misc Edits

  • Directory page: redesign so that bullets and letters don’t overlap
  • Is there anything we can do about these random “no subject” comment spams? Is Captcha no longer working since we switched to 5.0?
  • On the account “about” edit screen, putting an email address in the E-mail field returns an error message saying the entered text was not a url.

Getting Active / Site Update Notes

As you’ll note, things have changed a bit around here. Basically, I’m getting active here again. I have no desire to work professionally on the ‘08 political cycle, but I find it impossible to resist the lure of grassroots activism. My first move was to get the site upgraded, install a better theme, and move to a faster server. Future Majority is now an official project of my company, Chapter Three LLC, hosted through our dedicated server at Advomatic and running on the latest and greatest Drupal 5.0.

The layout is going to keep evolving for a bit, but we should all be able to enjoy snappier site response times and more spacious page widths immediately. Suggestions for how to set this site up to take most advantage of the new DIY Organizing Wiki are most welcome, as is any feedback on the new look.

UPDATE: If you want to add suggestions to site design, feel free to post them in the [[Site Development|wiki page I set up for that]].

In addition to spending time on the technical underpinnings of the site, I plan on making some initial forays into the wild world of video-blogging here. Look for that in the coming month.

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