Appropedia:Village pump/2016

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I'd like to suggest some design changes for the front page. My draft redesign is here. There's two main things I'd like to see:

1) Reduce size of header and announcements. Right now when I load the main page these two items take up all of the space that isn't dedicated to the top & side bars. I'm not very experienced in graphic design, but to my mind that's a waste of some valuable real estate.

2) Add a news section. Phil has been adding news items to Community action for sustainability on a daily basis. I think bringing them to the front page, and putting them next to the more static content on the front page offers a nice balance. It would do a better job of highlighting the breadth and depth of material covered on Appropedia.

I think both of these would spur more interest and participation from visitors to the site. Note that my draft has some issues: the left and right columns can become unaligned depending on what which random selections load. The Highlighted Projects section would also need to be edited to fit the left column. --Ethan (talk) 21:34, 29 November 2015 (PST)

I'd love to see a redesign. I'll have a closer look at your draft later (getting to work now) but:

• The part of the header that lists all the topic areas ("Appropriate technology • Construction • " etc) was an experiment, I think, and it isn't necessary as we have sidebar navigation and a search bar. We can remove it and see how that goes. In fact... Done! (If that turns out to be unpopular, any admin can revert, here: MediaWiki:Sitenotice.)
• News section would be excellent - the continual activity that's been happening on Appropedia means that we can keep that fresh.

Thanks! --Chriswaterguy (talk) 14:42, 30 November 2015 (PST)

This is looking good. Is there any way to bring the highlighted project higher. I feel like projects are the core of Appropedia and it would be cool to have it above the fold. Either way, I think it looks better as you have it and would be happy have you implement it. Eventually we will have staff for some awesome UX. In the mean time, I am glad that we can all make it better. While you are at it, can you:

• get rid of the links to friendfeed, identi.ca, and delicious at the bottom.
• add Pinterest - https://www.pinterest.com/appropedia/.
  • Done! --RichardF (talk) 07:06, 2 December 2015 (PST)

Thanks! --Lonny (talk) 18:24, 30 November 2015 (PST)

I don't see a big conceptual difference between "Community action news" and "Hot topics / In the news." Perhaps the items can be combined into one section or one section with two parts. I put together a sample layout --> here <-- to show how "Community action news" could be incorporated into the Main Page, while still keeping the "Highlighted project" near the top. --RichardF (talk) 06:43, 2 December 2015 (PST)

Hot Topics/In The News is more focused on the work of Appropedians, while Community Action News focuses on the work people are doing in communities around the world. Hot Topics/In The News is closer in content to the Appropedia blog. --Ethan (talk) 01:02, 4 December 2015 (PST)

That sounds like a reason to keep them distinct but not necessarily separate in general locations on the page. If you all need any more help with page layouts, let me know. --RichardF (talk) 06:41, 4 December 2015 (PST)

Hi all, it'd be good to take up Ethan's suggestion of getting some Community Action News into the main page. RichardF's general locations on the page looks good to me, but there seemed too much text on one band (row). A way round this might be to incorporate Selected Quote into one of the columns (for me adds to readability) example here. What do you all think? Philralph (talk) 10:52, 7 January 2016 (PST)

• Done! --Philralph (talk) 08:26, 20 January 2016 (PST)

Just thought I'd point out that the CC-BY-SA logo at the bottom right corner of each page links to the GNU FDL license instead of the CC license. --Hairless Wookie (talk) 01:00, 7 January 2016 (PST)

Woops – thanks!

Note for a tech admin: The guide to editing the footer is at mw:Manual:Footer. I guess we're still on CC Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported, but just FYI there is now CC Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International (but I haven't read up on the significance of the update). --Chriswaterguy (talk) 03:45, 7 January 2016 (PST)

For those that aren't aware, we have a tool here which is useful if you have a document or web page that you are converting to a wiki page. (Of course, be sure that you have permission, and give attribution as appropriate).

The tool: Wikedbox. --Chriswaterguy (talk) 04:32, 8 January 2016 (PST)

I wanted to mention a few things this non-techie editor has noticed since the site was updated:

• I often see what I think are the announcements at the bottom of the front page, misaligned and where they shouldn’t be. I can upload a screenshot if nobody else is seeing this.
• The blog section on the front page appears to be blank.
• I can’t access Special Pages at all. When I go to https://www.appropedia.org/Special:SpecialPages and click on any of these pages, the response I get is this: The following data is cached and may not be up to date. A maximum of 1,000 results are available in the cache. There are no results for this report.
• As I add categories to uncategorised articles, the total article count seems to be going backwards. I am not sure why this is happening.

I thought I’d best pass these things on. Thanks for considering them. Felicity (talk) 02:02, 12 January 2016 (PST)

Whoa – thank you for noticing those changes, and letting us know. I'm not in charge of tech things, but we do have a developer doing a few things. Let's see what Lonny says. --Chriswaterguy (talk) 05:58, 12 January 2016 (PST)

Thanks Chris, happy that it's on the radar. Felicity (talk) 00:40, 13 January 2016 (PST)

Felicity's points 1&2 are the same bug. The blog section list doesn't conform to proper formatting. I'm guessing it's a conflict of the new CSS with JS. The weird thing is sometimes if you reload it *does* format correctly. --Ethan (talk) 21:27, 21 February 2016 (PST)

This falls under "feature, not a bug": since the update any page you edit will have the watch box checked (ticked) by default. Can we turn that off? --Ethan (talk) 19:43, 25 February 2016 (PST)

If you search for how to measure stream flow or conventional farming on Google, the definition box now comes from Appropedia. Confirmed in multiple countries. Great stuff... except that our conventional farming isn't as good as it could be.

(Thanks to Lonny for discovering this!) --Chriswaterguy (talk) 14:47, 31 January 2016 (PST)

Nice to learn this, thanks for the update. It's great to learn about increasing traction and responsiveness, keep up the great work everyone. :) Felicity (talk) 02:37, 2 February 2016 (PST)

I was going to wait until I finished porting content from PermaWiki to do this, but there was a recent heated conversation about open-source permaculture. I was a little disappointed that our broadest permaculture pages didn't get mentioned, though some other sections of Appropedia were referenced. So I went ahead and added permaculture to the main page header, the sidebar and the main page selected portals (which may need to wait for a cronjob or cache refresh to appear?). I hope to raise the profile of Appropedia as permaculture wiki, because it is the only active one out there (also the Appropedia Foundation is a more trustworthy steward of this information than Wikia). If anyone objects, we can reverse these changes. --Ethan (talk) 21:38, 27 February 2016 (PST)

Thanks Ethan, looks good.

We have a number of great content areas, so I'm wondering how best dto display it all... might be something to ask a MediaWiki-friendly web designer. --Chriswaterguy (talk) 06:16, 12 March 2016 (PST)

I've worked out how to let people make a recurring monthly donation to the Appropedia Foundation, to keep Appropedia growing and doing awesome things. If you're in a position to support us, please click "Donate" in the sidebar. Thanks! --Chriswaterguy (talk) 18:29, 16 March 2016 (PDT)

Are Appropedia Foundation accounts available somewhere? Would it be possible to have a direct link to them from the "Donate" page? Philralph (talk) 02:20, 18 March 2016 (PDT)

No, but I'd support making them available. Maybe we need to look at equivalent organizations (e.g. the Wikimedia Foundation) to help us with out whether there are particular things we need to keep confidential. I'm neither a lawyer nor an accountant.

I'll pass this suggestion on to the board. Thanks. --Chriswaterguy (talk) 04:34, 18 March 2016 (PDT)

Donation error PayPal has told me twice:

Sorry — your last action could not be completed Error Message

Your request failed due to technical difficulties.Please try again after some time.

Just so you know. Koavf (talk) 16:20, 3 July 2016 (PDT)

Following on from my earlier comments: could Appropedia make use of open collective? - "A group of people with a shared mission that operates in full transparency"? Might this sort of thing be useful even if used to meet some, not necessarily all, of Appropedia's objectives, at first? Philralph (talk) 10:49, 19 April 2017 (PDT)

for more see eg: Open Collectives: transforming our cities from the bottom-up, Apr 11: @OuiShare and BrusselsTogether, "lets you create a virtual association so that you can get started in no time and focus on what you want to do to improve Brussels" - though there may be better examples in the context of Appropedia, Philralph (talk) 11:10, 19 April 2017 (PDT)

Waterpedia See https://waterpedia.wiki/wpw/index.php/Waterpedia:About I figured this community and that one can work together. Koavf (talk) 16:15, 3 July 2016 (PDT)

See here I get a 404 message:

Page not found (404) Request Method: GET Request URL: http://ekopedia.org/

Using the URLconf defined in odc.urls, Django tried these URL patterns, in this order:

	 ^admin/
	 ^odc/(?P<url>.*)/$ [name='odc']
	 ^_odc/(?P<url>.*)/$ [name='odc']
	 ^__odc/(?P<url>.*)/$ [name='odc']
	 ^bloquery_post/ [name='bloquery_post']
	 ^fiches/$
	 ^vol/(?P<ht>.+)/$ [name='vol']
	 ^vol2/$ [name='vol2']
	 ^show/(?P<mo>.+)/$ [name='show']
	 ^show_all/(?P<mo>.+)/$ [name='show_all']
	 ^templ/(?P<mo>.+)/$ [name='templ']
	 ^mod/(w{0,50}) [name='mod']
	 ^web_editor/attachment/add/$ [name='docs']
	 ^web/dataset/call_kwx$ [name='docs']
	 ^website/
	 ^theme_enark/
	 ^web/
	 ^web_editor/
	 ^builder/
	 ^theme_common/
	 ^docs_list/$ [name='docs_list']
	 ^docs_upload/$ [name='doc_add_form']
	 ^doc_erase/(?P<name>.*)/$ [name='doc_erase']
	 ^static/website/translations/$ [name='noslash']
	 ^(?P<url>.*)/$ [name='url']
	 ^media\/(?P<path>.*)$

You're seeing this error because you have DEBUG = True in your Django settings file. Change that to False, and Django will display a standard 404 page. Does anyone know what's up? The same thing happens at en.ekopedia. Koavf (talk) 20:42, 10 July 2016 (PDT)

The Ekopedia and Appropedia teams are working together on the problem, but could use more help from people experienced in database and wiki management. --Ethan (talk) 23:06, 21 July 2016 (PDT)

Hello Intrepid Appropedians!

Thank you for your patience with our Captchas recently. We know that they had become too arduous and buggy. We have upgraded our captcha based spam abatement significantly. We hope your experience is also significantly enhanced! Please let us know if you have any problems editing, joining, posting, etc.

Thanks again, --Lonny (talk) 15:05, 21 September 2016 (PDT)

Great job! Very minimal spam is making it through now. --Ethan (talk) 22:48, 25 February 2017 (PST)