Challenges for the new website

To set up a website the way we described in the Wiki (we need to import this stuff here) there are some descisions we need to make, and some challenges facing us that may require coding or altering the way we work.

The real challanges are not in the CMS though, its in coming up with new guidelines and rules of governance.

sticky topics like posting guidelines, moderation guidelines, administration guidelines, who belongs to which user group and how to determine the criterea, how to avoid conflicts, how to encourage contribution etc.

I will stick to the drupal specific problems here, the rest needs a long dialogue.

• firgure out which blocks to enable
• figure out a taxonomy system for the whole website
• figure out an editorial policy
• come up with icons and artwork for navigation and taxonomy icons (and smilies??)

Forum

• almost all forum issues are resolved
• only missing stuff are some convenience moderation feature like ability to move comments.
  • easily implementable, needs on complex SQL query, hard part is UI design)
  • look into ability to promote comment to node
• users can't attach files to forum posts at the moment (they can use a filestore module to upload files then reference them in their posts, and one can look into automating this).

Wiki

• The wiki modules just adds Markup; features like BackLinks and WikiCategories are missing, no idea if we can substitute these with an existing drupal feature or if we need to add our own.
• categories can be replaced with drupal taxonomy, however since taxonomy manupilation cannot be delegated on a single vocabulary basis we cannot allow all users to edit the taxonomy (not to mention that it is a bit complicated), this means wiki organization will be a bit centralized (not nessecarily a bad thing since normal users can always create pages that just list WikiWords).
• categories may also be replaced by the book outline feature (this actualy seems to be the more reasonable approach), interaction between taxonomy and book outline is confusing to most users.
• apparently wiki footnotes don't work.
• apparently inlined wiki images don't work.
• collered diff views between revisions are also missing.

Blogs

• how can we make blogs attractive and an incentive for members to contribute? (all these ideas need a hack)
  • allow them to moderate their blogs.
  • allow them to style their blogs with their own CSS and themes.
  • allow full html markup
  • allow PHP code (maybe with moderator approval, since php code running inside drupal pages runs within the drupal space and has access to all variables, this is a limitation in php and there is nothing that can be done about it).

Interface

• The default drupal navigation interface assumes the user understands how drupal works.
• we need to build menus and navigational blocks that expose a simpler interface.
• do we hide the druapl interface completly, or allow it for certain user groups (administrators, moderators, senior users).
• we need a method for anonymous users to switch locales
• The bidi problem needs to be addressed, what is the default direction of the webpage RTL or LTR.

Privileges

• one can allow users to post to any section but wait for moderator approval.

Polls

• We want to allow members to post polls as usual, however we need official polls once a month or so to make things interesting.
• the poll block displays the latest poll regardless of who started it.
• however administrators and moderators can promote a poll to the home page, does it look good on the body of the home page?
• we could find a way to make an official polls only block if needed.

Todo

• Moderated RSS procedure, have an aggregator that track important pages, and have moderators promote top news to the side bars.
• easy to read docs describing all new features

Missing Features at the moment

• Member rating system
• single page with all rss feeds