Website Reorganization

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[edit] Goals

Extensive changes have been proposed to the website based our experience over the last few years. The goals of this reorganization are the following:

  1. Create a more dynamic, stickier website
    1. Ability to easily "promote" content from a variety of sources to the home page or more prominent places on the site
    2. Ability to incorporate more user content into the website
  2. Create a more coherent, connected website
    1. More consistent appearance, branding and navigation
    2. More interconnected links, so that information is better connected and users do not have to search as many different locations for information about the subject of their interest
  3. Shift away from proprietary tools to open source ones (for a variety of obvious reasons)
  4. Ability to migrate in stages with an absolute minimum of downtime (not more than a couple hours at a time hopefully)
  5. Ability to have better feedback. It would be great to have good information on referrers as well as which pages are popular and how folks click through. We can use this feedback to understand our visitors better obviously.
    1. a real nice to have would be ability to analyze "unique" visitors. OdNT shows 60K uniques in june, but the IP "history" is only good for an hour, so it could be 60,000 different visitors a month or it could be 2,000 visitors that visit everyday.
    2. also would be curious as to browsers and operating system information. Sorry if this stuff is rudimentary, or if we already have, but I don't know how to access much of it.
    3. top ranked search terms (see global search below) would also be neat-o

Most of 5. could be done with a tool like analog, although there are probably newer and better ones on the market. In any case, the data is available through your webserver, your CMS doesn't need to track it (except for global search). If you *really* want to get in-depth, you could use a cookie to do tracking of browsing patterns, but that's walking a line between excessive or not. Srobertson 21:44, 3 Jul 2006 (CDT)

[edit] Functionality

[edit] Main Web Page

this is the "start here" welcome page for all newcomers, it should have links to get you quickly started on your way to getting the information you're looking for. This will largely be left as it is now in appearance, but In addition to what's on there now, it should have some additional links. Some proposed links are in Website_Reorganization:Homepage_Links. The primary job of the website is to give newcomers a starting place. Because the Neuros Brand has such low awareness, we shouldn't try to make the home page to "dynamic" or topical. That will be the job of other pages, like OdNT.

  1. Ability to show topical "promoted content," is important. A headline or two, something like the recent 442 update would have been a good candidate for example. The idea here is pretty simple, although the home page is primarily intended to be static, we certainly should be able to promote a piece of news or two simply to give ordinary users a reason to visit again and promote the things that are most immediately important.

[edit] Forums

Main page: Website Reorganization:Forums

The forums need to be switched, and soon. Help out with the decisions on the above page!

[edit] OdNT (open.neurostechnology.com)

This is the "portal" for open source developers/enthusiasts. This will continue to have slightly different branding from the main site since this is the open source site (and we're even going to get a mascot soon, thanks to Thom at Third Rail Design Lab)

I'm not sure that a heck of a lot will change here.

  1. create a frame or window that shows IRC #neuros channel

I'd love to have a web client that's an easy "window" into the #neuros channel something like what Rockbox does Here it would really be cool if there was a frame from OdNT that would automatically log folks in when they went to the page (give a special character that would list them at the bottom of the user list so as not to clutter things up)

[edit] Mailing lists

  1. Per forum discussion above, mailing lists will ultimately be merged in with forums, but for time being, current structure will remain in place"
    1. Google groups- primarily aimed at developer/hacker discussion
    2. beta list-just for private special offer for beta members
    3. Gamma List- will alert users to Gamma Offers
    4. General Mailing list- Monthly newsletter to everyone that's opted in

[edit] Global Search

There should be one place to search the entire site including

  1. "official" webpages
  2. OdNT
  3. forums
  4. wiki
  5. IRC logs

It should allow at a glance to see the information source or somehow segregate them. Thoughts?

[edit] Tools

The currently proposed tools are the following, these tools were generally chosen because they are widely used, are open source, are familiar to many (meaning it will be a lot easier to draw upon the community for help). In most cases, these are already tools that we use.

  1. Drupal-Use this for the main page, but migrate over the current look and feel and navigation
  2. SMF- Thom from Third Rail Design Lab has graciously offered to help with reconfiguring and "reskinning" this for our branding. User:Srobertson has offered to migrate the old forums. In the old proprietary days, we couldn't have scheduled an initial meeting to discuss this stuff in the time it took them to set it up!!!
  3. Bugzilla-Already setup no changes needed
  4. Subversion-Already setup, no changes needed
  5. Wikimedia- User:Pgunn has already begun to upgrade the old wiki to a newer version. Thanks!


[edit] Which CMS?

The content management system we select will, hopefully, be at the core of a well-integrated and unified experience. Although the majority of contributions to the Neuros community won't happen on a page directly bound by the CMS, the majority of users looking for information will probably start there before anywhere else. In addition, although there are a bunch of other options for this, a good CMS should be designed to accomodate and assimilate many forms of communication into one central location. So picking the right CMS could save us a lot of work in the future, and picking a crappy one could definitely make things harder.

I have (boldly) prepared a chart that compares some options. Check it out and add your thoughts. Srobertson 14:22, 3 Jul 2006 (CDT)

[edit] Status

As of July 2, 2006:

  1. Main NeurosTechnology WebPage We already have Drupal set-up and running, but no concrete plans or resources have been setup to migrate the basic look and feel and functioning of the current website over there.
  2. BBphp Has already been setup and old data brought over
    1. Restructuring (see Website_Reorganization:Forum_structure)
    2. Look and feel- Thom has graciously offered help
    3. Configuration and setup of "badges" - Thom has graciously offered help
  3. IRC Client- as of a few minutes ago, DeepB setup a log awaited IRC web client, although I was outvoted on a more automatic login :(
  4. Global Search No clue

As of July 10, 2006

  1. Simple Machines Forum" setup with no templates, mailing list "poking around on it"
  2. Global Search Google Mini front runner Joshmalone currently testing compatability with bugzilla

As of July 21, 2006

  1. Drupal chosen as CMS
  2. SMF chosen as Forums, partially setup, feel free to post: forums.neurostechnology.com
  3. server structure figured out, extensive discussion about how to throttle for high spikes in load


[edit] Open Issues

  1. how do we do the "global search?" I'm looking to get started with the easiest, off the shelf solution possible
  2. hosting needs to be figured out
    1. Verizon
    2. ServerCentral
    3. FDC Servers
  3. User Management? LDAP this has been discussed, see User Management but no conclusions (that I'm aware of)
  4. Main site content/themes/etc but this is part of a larger discussion (and less immediate since we're leaving the main site in place for now)
  5. will OdNT site content change? How?

[edit] Deadlines/Milestones

  1. Most important thing is really migrating the forums quickly, which it sounds like is no big deal. It would be great to migrate them immediately (pick phpBB or SMF) and start having OSD discussions there. This is pretty urgent since OSD samples are already going out.
    1. Having the forums "decorated" with the Neuros look and feel by OSD Gamma launch is pretty important. We are planning this for July 31st, and it will be an asset to have new forums with active discussion and a Neuros look and feel in making people feel comfortable with the purchase.
  2. Goals by Aug 18 (in addition to the above)
    1. global search in place and working
    2. New CMS setup and working,
      1. decide on a site structure.
      2. Put in skeleton pages.
      3. some docs/understanding of how we'll migrate the home page, etc.
    3. any actual migration work is icing on the cake, but would be great have started. Those steps include:
      1. Recruit community members.
      2. Populate the thing.

(srobertson: At the same time, we should also deal with theming the site as necessary.)

  1. Q4 will be upon us soon so having the main webpage migrated by September 15th would certainly be great. Thoughts?
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