[sudo-sys] Website Upgrades

[Matthew Senate]

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 at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Tue, Apr 29, 2014 at 4:37 PM, Matthew Senate <mattsenate at gmail.com>
> wrote:
> > I plan to have www.sudoroom.org direct users to a landing page on this
> site,
> > with clear donation and calendar information, rather than directing them
> to
> > the wiki (as it does now).
>
> Why can't we just work to put clear donation and calendar information
> on the wiki?
>
> You probably know that my preference has been to deprecate wordpress
> and eventually move everything onto the wiki. I put a lot of work into
> that project after first seeking input from everybody else involved. I
> think the wiki format has potential to be more transparent and
> hierarchical.
> _______________________________________________
> sudo-sys mailing list
> sudo-sys at lists.sudoroom.org
> https://lists.sudoroom.org/listinfo/sudo-sys
>
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