[CUWiN-Dev] Tentative drum roll... New CUWiN site mock-up now online:

[Sascha Meinrath]

Hi all,

I've been working with Steven on a new website for the CUWiN project. 
The latest mockup (this is about the 4th iteration and the first we felt 
was complete enough to get everyone's feedback on).  Please post any 
feedback to the forum topic http://cuwin.stevesgallery.com/forum/4 
specifically for this purpose.  Keep in mind that this is a ful content 
management system -- so there are different roles which allow access to 
different features.

Steve has also (thoughtfully) documented the process for porting 
information from Webeasel to Drupal.  He's also preserved much of the look 
and feel of the old website ("to minimize shellshock") but is also willing 
to develop an entirely new theme if we wish.

--Sascha


---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Mon, 21 Mar 2005 01:09:08 -0500
From: Steven Mansour <steven.mansour at gmail.com>
To: Sascha Meinrath <sascha at ucimc.org>
Subject: Tentative drum roll...

Howdy!

http://cuwin.stevesgallery.com/

I think you could pass it around a bit now. I've made some changes based 
on what I think I would like to have for my community wireless website.

Here are some preliminary things you should note:

1 - There are 4 user roles:

- Anonymous users can view all the content, but can't post anything
- Authenticated users (people who have registered) can post and reply
to forum topics, and comment on news and nodes.
- Developers can do that, plus create glossary items ("dictionary" for
technical terms), create and maintain pages and user manuals, access
site statistics, moderate the forums, and upload files.
- Editors can do all that, create news / blog entry items, administer
news feeds, moderate comments and nodes, maintain and post events.
- "Benevolent dictators" [which should be restricted to you and me for
now] wield supreme power, which they can use for either good or evil.
In other words, don't break anything.

2 - I've created a few categories for each node type: forum categories, 
news categories, etc. You'll want to customize these later under "admin -> 
categories". By the way, "news" = "blog". Only blog entries, and events 
get promoted to the front page, and that's why only editors can create 
them.

3 - Ideally, one developer should be a "mini-moderator" for each forum 
category. That basically means that he/she should go into their account 
settings, subscribe/notify to a category, so that as soon as a user posts 
a forum topic, they're alerted and can reply promptly to the user, and, as 
the case may be, file a bug report. This really isn't much work for them 
and should be considered a tool to ease external users reporting bugs. 
It'll make their job easier in the long run.

4 - After long deliberation between both sides of my brain, I've decided 
against using the project module for your software. You do already use CVS 
/ (subversion) for development, and it's not realistic to ask your devs to 
deal with a propietary bug reporting system that they'll probably have to 
replace eventually. Instead, the forums will do a better job of isolating 
and squashing bugs reported by users.

5 - The event module is great to plan meetings and such, and I integrated 
it with the calendar to give a nice little view:

http://cuwin.stevesgallery.com/event/2005/04/01

6 - There is still some content missing. I'll eventually try to copy all 
of it over, but in case I miss anything, here's the general procedure you 
(editor or benevolent dictator) should follow to port it over:

- Look at the page name on the old site (oldpage.html), then view the
source on that webeasel page.
- Look at where the content text body begins (usually a weird,
super-long line of text with a capital "<P>"), and ends ("</P>").
- Create a page on the new site, titled "newpagename", and paste the
source you copied from the old site.
- Preview it, make sure the text formatting is alright and that all
tags (<b>, <p>....) are properly closed. If you can't get it to look
right, you should remove all tags (especially <p> and <div>). This is
best done with a good text processor, copied and pasted back and
forth.

7 - All downloadable files should go into the /files folder.

8 - I tried to keep the layout and theme close to the old one, for the
sake of minimizing shell-shock among everyone else. If you give me
some creative license, I'd like to come up with a new theme and layout
eventually (maybe after the site goes live).

9 - Because I'm the one who transfered most of the old content, "steven" 
appears as the author for the news items. I'll change my account name to 
"CUWIN" or "sascha" before we go live and it'll change on all the entries 
as well.

10 - We'll need to configure a scheduled backup of both the database and 
files, every night if possible. A simple script called via cron is fine, I 
can make one and send you the instructions.

11 - The sooner you give me feedback on issues, the faster I can resolve 
them. Instead of emailing them to me though, I'd like you to post them as 
forum topics here: http://cuwin.stevesgallery.com/forum/4 . Figure we 
might as well use it a bit to start. :)

Keep me posted.

Cheers,

Steve