EnhancedLoCoWeb

The ColoradoTeam is working on an enhanced home page and web presence. This page distills some of the discussion and suggestions.

One helpful outcome of this work will hopefull be to contribute ideas and templates to other LoCoTeams. E.g. we can propose a LocoTeamTemplate along the lines of the existing TeamPageTemplate so that new LoCoTeams will have something to get started with when they create their home page in the wiki.

Best Practices

Several existing LoCoTeams have been nominated as having nice web presences:

Content requirements

What sorts of content are important for a local community? This is an important driver for the choice of layout and toolset for a web presence.

  • News
  • Calendar - important to have in one way or another. The issues are
    • making it easy for folks to integrate our calendar data with their other calendar solutions (ical, xml, etc)
    • making it easy for us to integrate the upcoming events into our wiki and/or web page. We don't want double-maintenance of data.
    • making it easy to link it with other Ubuntu event listing like FeistyReleaseSchedule and http://fridge.ubuntu.com/event

  • Links to local support options: probably wouldn't be changing frequently
  • Quick links to generic Ubuntu documentation, the team's Launchpad, forum, etc
  • Member info
  • Projects
  • Meeting info

Content management

How should this content be managed? We want useful, attractive content that is easy for appropriate loco members to contribute to.

One option is to put most stuff on the wiki. This integrates well with much of the rest of the Ubuntu web presence, and reuses existing authentication infrastructure for SingleSignOn. It is also easier for different teams to reuse and collaborate on creative wiki approaches. The wiki content is consistenty searchable, offers a consistent look-and-feel, including "actions" like subscribing to update modifications, access to update histories and "Show print view".

Another option is putting content on an external home page that is more attractive for newcomers than the default wiki loco home page, and that leverages more content-specific web applications than a wiki.

Dynamic content like member listings, projects, meeting info and local resources work well on the wiki. Separate links for those things would probably be appropriate from the home page, rather than one link to a "wiki" without hinting at what sort of information we put there.

If Launchpad starts supporting a SingleSignOn option like OpenID, that would make it easier for Ubunteros to edit content maintained via applications on other sites. It would often still be necessary in some cases, though, for the the site admins to authorize the OpenIDs appropriately.

Another option would be to put most content on an integrated CMS like Drupal, or build something suitable on a python framework like Django.

Calendar

Software for calendar support is a challenge. What good tools can support the requirements above? A quick google search didn't reveal e.g. an rss feed for the google calendar that would make it easy to get a chronological list of upcoming events. They have an ical feed, and an xml feeds, but the xml feed was not in chronological order and looked like it requires parsing to sort chronologically.

Perhaps a moinmoin plugin for http://microformats.org/wiki/hcalendar would be a good way to go, but I don't know of one yet. Shouldn't be too hard....

News

If the project content is on the wiki, the wiki might also be good for news items, which are often linked to the projects.

Image galleries

Design

Nick Verbeck has laid out some designs for the new page at http://coloco.nerdynick.com/

Hosting

* We can stay with our current host and domain, or consider the advice in LoCoHosting

ColoradoTeam/EnhancedLoCoWeb (last edited 2008-08-06 17:00:19 by localhost)