[WF-General] Web site ideas: Diary, Personal page and Meeting database

[HansHäggström]

Here are some web page ideas for the future.
I don't know if they have already been discussed or addressed in the new 
site design, but I hope they can provide some inspiration.


* Web based developer diary

Similar to the one on http://www.advogato.org/
Project members could write about what they are working on currently, tell 
if they are away on a vacation for the next weeks, or just rant about 
something that happens to interest or annoy them at the time.  This way one 
can post small ideas and personal news without feeling like spamming the 
mailing lists.  It would also make it easier for new members to get a 
picture of what everybody is doing, and getting an idea of whom to talk 
with about some topic.

The diary entries could be listed in a sidebar on the news page, sorted in 
latest updated first order.


* Team member pages

Similar to SourceForges personal pages ( https://sourceforge.net/my/ ), but 
viewable to anyone (at least mostly).
This would be linked to from the team list.  It would contain the usual 
general information found on the current team page.  Here the team member 
could tell a bit about him/her self.  Possibility to update and edit the 
information is naturally important.  It would also contain the diary 
described above and any tasks or bugs assigned to the person.

It might also be possible for the member to create new pages as sub pages 
of his/her member page, or with links from it, where he/she could put up 
any personal worldforge related material.


* Meeting database

Currently meetings are updated to the website by hand.  The meeting pages 
are often out of date, and meeting summaries and logs are spread around the 
website on the pages of various projects.  A central database could be used 
to store the meeting info in, and could dynamically generate listings of 
upcoming meetings, maybe post news items, and possibly even link to the 
colorified logs from the correct channel when a meeting has taken 
place.  It could also provide support for summaries by building template 
pages for them.

The meeting database could contain the information from the current 
schedule page, http://www.worldforge.org/website/about/schedule/  plus some 
other useful info:

- Date - Repeating dates should also be supported, like every other Thursday.
- Time - In GMT, and maybe also the viewers timezone, if he/she is logged on.
- IRC Channel
- Meeting title - Title used in listings and news announcements.  "Media 
meeting", "STAGE planning meeting", etc.
- Topics  - List of topics to be discussed on the meeting
- Category  - What project / category the meeting belongs to.  For example 
"media", "rules/acorn" etc.  This could be used to list the meeting on the 
relevant project page on the WF site.
- Link to summary of the meeting
- Link to log of the meeting

The meeting database idea could also be abstracted to include other 
scheduled events.


* Small addition to team database: Author Tag.

Author tags are short tags that are appended last on media file names, to 
mark the artist and ensure that the filenames stay unique.  The author tag 
is usually the initials, but it could also be some other short nickname or 
such (examples are "us", "ta", "hh").

An important requirement for author tags is that they should be unique 
within the project.  There is also some reserved words (other tags, like 
"n", "s", "e", "w", "ne", "bump", etc) that can not be used as author 
tags.  It would be nice if author tags could be created when a person joins 
the project, for example by using all initials if a middle name is supplied 
or initials + second letter from surname as the default, and stored in the 
team database.  Later this could be integrated with the media database, 
enabling nice features like automatic linking from a piece of graphic or 
music to the author.

(For more info about filename tags, see the half finished 
documentation:  http://www.worldforge.org/images/tmp/filename_tags.html )


-- 
Hans Häggström (aka zzorn)
http://www.helsinki.fi/~haggstro/
"Share and Enjoy" - Cirius Cybernetics corp. - THHGTTG