[Imc-uk-useability] Working on startpage changes

[WietsE]

Zak wrote:
> 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.)
>   

Yeah, I agree on this. It could be a lot more compact. Also it should 
really link to an article or page within Indymedia, rather then all 
external links, which its doing at the moment.


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

See Shiars email

> (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?
>   

I thought it would either show the most recent post from that media type 
OR can be manually changed (if required). Like it might be that someone 
posts a really good article (text) and we'd like to highlight it, 
although not worth a feature. Just some thoughts.


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

I guess it could be manually selected, I would be up for updating this 
section and I'm sure people like Mini Mouse, Tash and Guy would be glad 
to see such an option for the startpage. Would it be possible to switch 
on an automatic selection and 'disable' if required?


> (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? ...
>   

Hmm, some good points. I'm not sure about this, but it does make sense 
to show the one which is the most active...

> 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.
>   

Nice one Zak ;-)

>> 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.
>   

What days are good for you to meet? Maybe we can plan it so that we can 
all meet at some point.

Cheers, Wietse