Site Development

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.