Re: [sudo-sys] Website Upgrades

Jordan, Totally understand where you're coming from. We have discussed this in the past. I didn't block when you made changes before because do-ocratically you had a vision and a plan for improving the site (which is great), and I was not able to deliver an alternative in a reasonable timeframe. However, I think you'll find that my proposed upgrades are worth it and provide a viable alternative to using the wiki alone. Also know that I've spent quite a bit of time this week researching all the available solutions to work with MediaWiki, especially while working on http://wiki.omni-oakland.organd I found that there are few options for our needs. Since you changed the landing page to the wiki, several folks have explained they could not find the calendar or events. I'm not against a wiki being the whole website in theory, but unfortunately MediaWiki has a lot of limitations from a design, user experience, and functionality perspective: 1. There is not a good, stable theme option for using a top menu. This vastly constrains navigation for new users and users unfamiliar with MediaWiki. 2. The editing interface (while getting thorough attention after years of neglect https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Visual_editor) is far from being as usable as WordPress's or other CMS's editors. This is especially relevant for embedding media and images, plus the nightmare of mediawiki markup (formatting). 3. Feed, comment, and spam-comment management for blog publication is nearly non-existent with MediaWiki, compared to WordPress which was built with this at heart and performs at the state of the art for web-logging. 4. Event management is not a commonly desirable or very supported feature for MediaWiki. I think the best option is what I implemented on the Omni wiki, but it is very limited (no recurrence or feed/export) http://wiki.omni-oakland.org/w/Calendar and I don't think suffices But even after thinking about these limitations, I wasn't sold on simply keeping the WordPress site. However, in my research, I found an event management / calendar solution that provides a unique feature - Event Booking with the "Events Manager" plugin: https://wordpress.org/plugins/events-manager/ This has been the missing piece of sudo room's event management since the beginning--allowing folks to register for our workshops, classes, meetups, etc. You can set multiple ticket types, and even list them with prices (e.g. material costs). Users with accounts on sudoroom.org can register, but also anonymous users with just an email address. This way, event hosts can not only get an idea of who is showing up, but they can maintain contact information with these folks and follow up in the future. After testing this out on http://dev.sudoroom.org/ I was sold. I really think this is a feature that alone makes it worth keeping the WordPress site. That being said, providing clarity to new users through a clean landing page (without the MediaWiki template) is the other primary reason this makes a lot of sense to me. I'm looking at something like i3 Detroit as a bit of a model: http://www.i3detroit.org/ and I think Counter Culture Labs captures this "landing page" feel accurately as well: https://counterculturelabs.org Finally, as we're discussing Sudo Reboot, the Omni, etc, I realized something. We should expect to build more web and digital infrastructure, more applicatoins, and more services. As Jenny has begun to coordinate, we desperately need a membership-management system like SeltzerCRM https://github.com/elplatt/seltzer and I think it's a great option given the adoption and growth it has had over the couple of years since I first looked at it. In this way, the priority is not shrinking the number of applications, but instead, figuring out ways to make them inter-operable. I believe the primary challenge for us going forward is an authentication solution, and I don't see any viable alternatives other than Persona: https://sudoroom.org/wiki/Persona // Matt On Tue, Apr 29, 2014 at 5:33 PM, Yar <yardenack(a)gmail.com> wrote: