Revision of Challenges for the new website from Tue, 18/05/2004 - 3:19pm

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 challanges 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 guidlines 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.

Forum

• How different can the forum be from the original forum
• Which formatting syntax to use, we have "BbMarkup", "HtmlMarkup", "WikiMarkup", html and wiki can coexist a bit but bb conflicts with wiki.
• We need to decide on a threading mode, while we can allow users to choose, one style needs to be the strong default, users who browse at flat view will tend to hit reply on posts different than the ones they're replying to, which will break threaded view.
• The forum does not have a quote features at the moment, it is not realy needed in threaded mode.
• We don't have fine grained control over who is allowed to post on which forum yet, this was used to control the anounecment forum, however we don't realy need the anouncement forum since e got a stories feature.
• we can't set moderation rights per forum, a moderator will moderate all forums, in fact will moderate all comments.

Wiki

• Drupal has a collaborative book feature, which allows everyone to edit and has a link by title feature, these two features combined almost work as a wiki, the only thing missing is the ability to create WikiWords on the fly, to add a page one will have to create the page and then link to it (you could create the link and then the page but clicking on a link that points to nowhere will not trigger a create page function).
• If we use the wiki, it spans the whole website, we cannot ristrict wiki markup to one section only at the moment (not nessecarily a bad thing).
• A solution would be to treat the whole website as a pseudo wiki, and the books section as a proper full fledged Wiki.
• At the moment WikiPages are added to the users blog, I think the sane behavior should be adding a book page.
• 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.
• We could instead just install seperate wiki software, but lack of integration means alot of work to sync user accounts, and manual work whenever we need to link to content or attach content to/from wiki.
• my personal preference is to stick to drupal, and work on implementing whatever missing features.
• apparently wiki footnotes don't work.
• WikiSyntax is a bit rigid, but this makes for faster parsing, no big deal.

Blogs

• It doesn't make sense for blogs to be moderated, this might trouble many people though.
• Maybe we should restrict Blogs to senior members, and accept the fact that this will be a free speech area.
• only interfere with the blogs in cases of illegal behavior, other guidelines don't affect the blogs.
• how can we make blogs attractive and 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).
  • allow private galleries

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).
• The interface needs to be arabized, giving users a choice or arabic or english interface.
• The bidi problem needs to be addressed, what is the default direction of the webpage RTL or LTR
• We can have an RTL theme and an LTR theme, members would then choose their preferences, but text would render differently on each
• RTL and LTR can be overriden easily, so for articles and stuff like that there is no big deal.
• I could try to come up with a theme that implements the bidi algorithm

Privileges

• By default drupals privileges system works on a per module or content type basis, not a on a per node basis.
• We cannot assign fine grained privileges per page or section.
• There is a module that allows this, but it does not work with the lates drupal, we could either fix the bug thats prventing this module, or wait till its fixed and deploy it.
• but do we realy need this?
• i feel privileges by content type are a more open and inclusive form of governance, if a person contributes an article once they should be encouraged to do it again and again, an atitude of it takes one worthy contribution to gain new privileges sounds good to me.

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.
• Screenshot gallery
• Content moderation/rating system (do we need that?)
• easy to read docs describing all new features
• email notification
• private messages

Missing Features at the moment

• Calender
• Form based articles
• Member rating system
• Linux counter block
• single page with all rss feeds