I want to pile on to Lynn's question. I haven't seen what she's been writing, yet, but I believe it is really crucial. I've been working on making my site something that would be good for the State of Connecticut. As I've worked on it a little, I've been thinking about the sort of questions that I imagine Lynn will have to answer.
1) How do I make the site look the way I want? I imagine a start to this question talks about Themes, lists the themes that have been developed etc. One question it leads to is: 1a) How do I get other themes? A pointer on how to get the themes, how to unpack them, where to store them, how to turn them on and how to make them defaults needs to be described. 2) I really like the (whichever) theme, but I really want my site to have a graphic specific to my state (group, whatever). How do I change the graphic for (whichever) theme. I imagine comments about the graphic for each theme is stored under drupal/themes/(themename)/images It might be nice to list what the key images for each theme are, as well as recommended sizes if you want to replace them. In my case, I create an Aldon4Dean theme as an early test. It turns out that replacing header.jpg had it particularly easy to make my theme State specific. As a side question, should we recommend that themes use specific names to make such changes easier? 3) The page looks good for me, but when my friend logs in, she just gets 'not authorized' (or whatever that message is. How do I set up permissions some everyone can see what I want them to, and a few people can even get in and change it? A simple description of user roles and permissions needs to be provided. 4) Okay, now that I have the general page layout looking the way I want, should I use books, stories, blog entries, static pages, or what to store my content. Personally, I'm still trying to decide this myself. I would love to hear other peoples comments on that. I'm still experimenting. 5) Related to that, if I want to allow others to write stuff, should I use blogs? Forums? or what? My guess is that this ends up being a personal preference. I've done a little with blogs in drupal. They seem to fit in very nicely. I've also set up a forum, and they seem to appeal to a different type of audience. You might want to use one, the other, both, or none. What are others thinking about how people can write stuff? 5a) How do I set up forums? To the extent that you want to set up forums, you need to understand taxonomy. I managed to find my way through this with some experimentation, but it was too much for my wife and I imagine it is likely to be a bit much for other admins. 6) How do I get specific information to be on the side of every page? Here, blocks need to be explained, and especially, creating new blocks. In particular, creating a block that has an image, which links to some other site (e.g. back to the dfa site, or to the meetup site) should be explained. 7) Hey, this is starting to look like something. I've heard that there is some way to pull in articles from other sites. Something called Syndication. How does that work? I think it is important to have information on how to pull in a single site, how to pull in multiple sites, and perhaps even, explain how to link in Yahoo Groups. My concern here, is that I've done this using the standard syndication functionality. This uses 'bundles' and works quite well for my purposes. It seems that the proposed new import module works a bit different, and requires taxonomy, and also really needs some way of keeping the feeds from over running the server. The old version apparently deletes anything except the most recent 50 items from the feeds. 7a) I think the feeds are set up, but they aren't updating automatically. How do I get that to work? Talk about how to get cron running. Like with other areas, this should include both a Unix appraoch and a Windows approach. 8) Of course this leads to, I hear that the folks at DeanSpace have written, and are continuing to write a lot of neat addtions to Drupal. How do I get them and load them on my system? Describe a repository that is simple to use. CVS, SourceForge, etc, are probably a bit much. Also, we probably need to make sure we have modules (and themes) both as tarballs, but also as ZIP files for the Windows users. I think this covers a lot of the issues that I've run into so far. I would love to hear other peoples comments. I would also like to encourage people to consider helping get initial sites up and running now. I think it will help formulate the real issues, as well as get some sites running. Comments? Aldon -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Behalf Of Joshua Koenig Sent: Saturday, August 02, 2003 12:21 PM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: [hackers] Notes From Meeting Excellent point Lynn. I think the stock drupal modules we're including are: - forum - blog - profile (which will be modded) - book - poll We may want to include more and/or have some of the above installed but "turned off" by default in our kit. This will allow administrators to add functionality not by installing anything, but by activating what already shipped with their kit. cheers -josh >> 7) Setting milestones >> DRUPAL/KIT: >> - A vanilla release >> - Feature list: >> - endorse >> - event (calendar) >> - export (rss transmitter) >> - import (rss recieving) >> - mailinglist (mailing lists) >> - make_block (makes a node into a block) >> - postcard (ecard/graphic endorsement) > > Sorry to be so late on this--this has been Hell Week. These are the > features > we're writing, basically; what about "native" drupal modules already > extant > in the vanilla kit and encourage admins to enable? Are we going to > ship with > forum? blog? weblink? book? profile? poll? wha? Is it more a matter of > stripping some modules out? Just trying to figure out what us tech > writers > have got to explain. > > Lynn S. > > > ------------------------ Politics is the art of controlling your environment. Participate! Elect Howard Dean President in 2004! http://www.outlandishjosh.com/politics/dean/
