[sudo-sys] Website Upgrades

[Matthew Senate]

I forgot to mention that MediaWiki is not mobile-friendly and is
prohibitive for mobile-based users to get the information they need about
sudo room quickly from their devices.


On Tue, Apr 29, 2014 at 5:58 PM, Matthew Senate <mattsenate at gmail.com>wrote:

> 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.
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>>
>
>
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