[Imc-uk-useability] Working on startpage changes

[Zak]

WietsE wrote:

> https://docs.indymedia.org/view/Local/ImcUkStartpageChanges

This is looking great :) I've got a few (hopefully constructive)
thoughts/questions about various bits:


(3) Upcoming events -- this currently takes up more than one
screen-height on my display. Does it need to be more compact? (The G8
entry for instance has a lot of links, which should perhaps be on a
separate G8 links page.)


(8) Promoted newswire -- will promoted posts be duplicated in the open
column on the right, or only appear here?


(10) The audio/video/images highlights presumably point to the most
recent promoted post with that media type, but what about text? All
posts have text in them... perhaps this should be the most recent
promoted post with at least a given length of text, to highlight
in-depth articles?


(13) How is the "selected photo" selected?


(14) How is the "current major report" defined, given that there may be
more than one active, and the most active may not be the most recently
created. Do we pick one manually? Take the one with the most posts in
the last N days? ...


> Also it would be great if some more tech minded and abled people could 
> find some time to help out, so it moves beyond just drawings.

I've started working on the producers.xml changes required to make the
new selections of content available to the templates. Most are fairly
straightforward, although the automatically-chosen featured regions and
topics may require rather more complex database queries than Mir can
handle at present... (ie some Java hacking will probably be needed).

The next step will be to write some rough templates that actually
display the new content so I can make sure it's doing the right thing.
Then we can work on refining the layout and choice of content -- and
it'll probably need some attention from a CSS guru later on :)

I'm not so concerned with the left column at present -- although that
needs compacting, it's pretty separate from the rest of the startpage
template, and I imagine most of the work will be in CSS rather than
producer/template stuff.


> The next get together in IRC will be on Wed 31st Jan at 7pm. Please come 
> and join!

Wednesdays are always busy for me, so I'm afraid I won't be able to
attend, but hope to have some (at least semi-)working templates to show
by then.


Zak.