[nodel-discuss] website where we are now...

[lisa haskel]

Dear all,

Its great to see interest generated by the web site, even when spiky
at times.   And many thanks for the acknowledgement of my work.  I've
been very grateful for the loyal and consistent support. I think the
kick-off meeting at Cremer street that saul referred to made a very
good start. Its been a reference point for everybody which we've
refined but not wavered too far from, even though the development
timescale has been pretty extended on my part.  So thanks to everyone
who's contributed and stuck with it.

So maybe this is a good moment to recap where we are at:

I think we have a feature-set now that covers the main concerns.  (see
http://wiki.nodel.org/index.php/Features_List), and the data migration
is well on the way now.  I've been working on it a bit intermittently
but hope it will be complete on the new site within about 3 weeks.

The data migration will include all the users from the "old" site. I
am intending to migrate them in as "blocked", and at a time of our
choosing we can send an (automated) email to all the users inviting
them to set a new password and activate their account.

Design is a huge issue which I think we've covered.  If we can get
some good, well coded standards complient designs as flat html/css
pages that will be a good start and as Saul suggests; a session with
some of the early adopters with the designer would be good to ensure
the ethos carries through.

However for me equally big is the issue of user documentation / help
and general test and refinement of the site.  Its very tedious but
very important. Every form field label and explanation/help text will
go a long way to making our site useable.  It would be great to work
on this with some others.  We'll also discover bugs this way.

We already had the idea to make some screencasts for how to add
different "content types".  I'm enjoying going to "Jelly" at Space
studios on Thursdays to work on nodel:
(http://nodel.southspace.org/event/jelly) and Laura Lee has already
given very useful feedback.

If anybody would like to join on those days for some casual
co-working, including screencasting and nodel... would be great.  And
also if anyone wants to checkout the code and do any refinements
themselves, its all in subversion so contact me for a password.

We'll talk more soon...

Best to all,

Lisa


ps. I take the open streetmap point. its not difficult to switch this
as the code if very modular; i'm just prioritising the bigger tasks
like data migration first.