It is great to get to spend a few minutes looking around the new ComETS site, creating some content, and imagining how we might use it to get things done and bring people together in ComETS.

I see great potential here! John - you've done amazing work! (nah, don't mention it! -jt)

I'm going to use this group wiki page as a place to start taking notes, and asking questions about design and architecture questions for the site. This is really a placeholder, as we may want to come up with a better "way" or "ways" to do this sort of work.

notes

• "SIGs" are currently a major organizational element on the site - the SIG box on the front page serves as a primary way to find the content you're interested in. I really like this. It also supports the idea of changing SIGs to something more along the lines of "ComETS Communities" and using the edit my profile page as a way to hook people into the relevant communities
• Each SIG/Group has it's own RSS feed - awesome
• I like that I can share content with just a particular group - or post to a group and make the post public - this is a tricky concept that we need to figure out a way to communicate (would naming help?)
• I like the events list on the homepage. What other live content would be most useful to members? Should the events list live other places on the site?

questions / to-do

• can't upload user pictures - Failed to upload the picture image; the pictures directory doesn't exist or is not writable.
  • Fixed.  Try it again.
• Are "wiki pages" and "blog posts" organized outside of groups? (I see the SIG wiki categories box on the side of the SIG page)
  • Currently, no.  I struggled quite a bit with this--suggestions or changes are welcome!
• How do e-mail subscriptions work at the moment? (e.g., can I subscribe to my group's content?)
  • I don't have much experience w/ this and have been looking for easy ways to manage it for TLE--are there ways to create buttons to easily subscribe for groups or the whole site? Feel free to change the defaults!!!!
• look into ordering of "SIGs" block - listed by most recent?
  • I'm thinking about making this a manually created box of the "sanctioned" SIGs w/ a "more" link to the whole list.  Currently, it's a block provided by OG (not a view). Thoughts? -jt
• TinyMCE edit box has horizontal sliders - remove right side blocks? another solution?
• I used the "Group Wiki Page" content type to post meeting notes. Is that the preferred way to go? Or should meeting notes be tied to the "events" content type (might be interesting to have SIG meetings come up under "events" with easy access to minutes, etc. Is another content type in order? Or just an orientation to different things you can do with a Group Wiki Post?
• With multiple site admins - how should we track and vet changes to the site?
  • My vote is to let the chips fall and be ready for problems
• The Virtual worlds group has asked for comments to be open to the world. I think it's a good idea, but would add captchas to prevent spam. Anyone opposed?

changes
* admin theme - changed so "group" content type doesn't show author picture