Web development phase 4
By Ed Mitchell 15th June 2011
It’s that time of the budget again, we’re luring the technical group out for another radical burst of vibrant creation, innovation, enhancements, utterly vital site maintenance, longer term deep tech consolidation, worrying head scratching and emergent development work. This has begun and we hope to have the bulk of it finished by the Transition Network conference (8th July).
As ever, we’re preparing for late night conversations, Sunday afternoon meetings, long nights in front of the todo list, two dimensional food, and other cheap cliches to do with web development.
This list comes from our big web survey earlier in the year, staff workshops, website feedback, editorial developments, bugs arising over the last few months (thanks for your patience to all those who spotted them), face to face user meetings (thank you all for your sturdy feedback), serendipitous encounters down the back alleys of the web system, and discussions had while putting netting over Cherry trees, on bicycles, in campsites, allotments, over seedswaps and more.
So:
Waving a baited stick in front of their various lairs, nests and darkened back rooms, the plan is to lure the techs out to attend to the following list:
Phase 4:
Innovation track:
- Initiative profile adding for foreign sites (working with US for pilot in this phase)
- Social Reporting pilot portal
- Enhancements to resources functionality in Community Microsites (paid by REconomy project)
Enhancement:
- Design: more tidying, simplifying of forms, gradual tweaks on main design
- Ingredients: new system built with intra-connections to resources, tools, stages and more
- Landing pages creation and related design across site: to map to the ‘stages’
- Widgets work: new ‘training only’ widget, investigate functionality within widgets, problems on different platforms
- Navigation changes: Training to have own top level, About to move along or down
- Footer navigation: introduce and trial
- Something Ed doesn’t know about now but will be vital at the ‘weeping moment’
Maintenance:
- AW stats: Open Source package to replace Google Analytics
- Mercury/Varnish and Press flow: faster site, better caching
- Authentication: third party logins? (see Innovation #1)
- Contexts and panels tidy up (some big page changes where possible, see training page proposal)
- Bugs: plenty in there
- Mirroring: share core data in at least one other location, possibly two, on a regular basis
- Strategic thoughts and clarity on bombproof hosting and back ups
Desirable but not happening probably:
- Researchers process – see Helen Beathem, Carol Whitty
- Volunteers process