Appropedia:Site development/priorities: Difference between revisions

These are the very highest priorities for new features on Appropedia, in rough order.

If you can help with any of these, please add your name next to the one you can work on (if you can commit to working on it). Or leave a message on the talk page here, or on the talk page on one of the admins that deal with tech issues (User talk:Lonny, User talk:Curtbeckmann or User talk:Chriswaterguy).

Note: New features are tested first on the development site, so don't worry - you won't risk crashing Appropedia.

(Note: the following list is transcluded on Appropedia:Desired Features and some other pages, to draw attention to these requests.)

Out of date - working on this now. --Chriswaterguy 05:01, 13 February 2010 (UTC) There are many features that would be nice to have (see Appropedia:Desired features). Our current priorities,, are:Reply[reply]

1. WYSIWYG editor - FCKEditor looks very close, but not ready yet. We need a replacement for Uniwiki, which is proving to be a problem for some editors, and which clashes with Mediawiki 1.14. So either we work with wikiHow on accelerating the implementation of Wikia's WYSIWYG editor code (which contains a lot of wikia specific hooks) or we find an alternative interface (any suggestions?)
2. New skin - very important to make Appropedia an enjoyable and usable site for visitors.
3. Social features: better integration with network sites such as WiserEarth and GlobalSwadeshi, and better ways of monitoring activity and engaging with people in Appropedia - mw:Extension:SocialProfile?. (Also: better display of RSS feeds, so people can display their blogs in their userspace; Fan mail; OpenSocial)
4. Adding semantic features without some of the non-user-friendly aspects of Semantic MediaWiki. How does SMW work with FCKEditor? Which features of SMW should we turn on? (Off: Inline semantic information is probably confusing to newbies unless handled very cleverly in WYSIWYG. On: Allowing users to view the intersection of categories would be a very useful feature. On: Project tracking.)
5. Fix RecentChanges so it's possible to view more than 14 days.
6. A box on the navbar letting people easily email friends about the page they're viewing. "Tell a friend about this site. Email addresses will not be saved or used for any other purpose."
7. Map/geotagging features. (What do we want? Allow searching by distance from location...)
8. Develop a plan for grading articles and flagging them according to accuracy, reliability, usefulness. This raises many issues, including the weighting given to ranking by regular users compared to "expert" users. The Flagged Revisions extension is likely to be important, and so is the voting extension used on http://usability.wikimedia.org/ .
9. mw:Manual:wgForeignAPIRepo - allows us to specify another wiki to pull images from.
10. mw:Extension:MultiUpload - speed file upload.
11. ParserFunctions - the extension, or whatever gives Wikipedia the logical functions in templates, that we don't have.

Our current main priorities are:

• Setting up a test site, for checking new features and settings and making sure they don't break the site, before running them live. This will be MediaWiki, with all the extensions and settings we have now, then adding new features to see if they work. We've been promised help with this, but if you are able to assist, that would be fantastic.
• Appropedia:Skin (including a bigger edit toolbar)
• A new, simpler, navigation-focused main page. See Appropedia:User experience and Main_Page_tests. The test page is currently a construction site - feel free to edit. We need suitable open licensed photos (the community and food pics aren't properly licensed) and they need to be cropped square (or at least all cropped to the same ratios).
• Banner for visitors from partner sites

The next rank of issues include:

• Search improvements including Custom searches.
• Special license namespace(s) - we decided to use the mainspace, but add the {{open access}} notice (or other relevant notice) to the top of each page that doesn't fit the Appropedia license.

Previous list of priorities

• blog (set up here but skin needs tweaking)
• forums (on hold - Global Swadeshi is performing this role for now.)
• wikilink bot - kind of working. Chriswaterguy got this working to a degree, but as at early 2009, nothing has been done for some months.
• Special license namespace(s)

(priorities suggested by Chriswaterguy · talk 00:43, 5 November 2007 (PST) and updated 23:29, 18 February 2009 (UTC))Reply[reply]

There are many priorities - these are a select few. Only add or remove items here by consensus or after discussion with an admin.

Please add other priorities to Appropedia:Desired Features in the appropriate section, using the standard template there.

See also

• Appropedia:Tech team