I'm interested in helping out with an OSM UK website. I have a few ideas. Actually the thing I'm most interested in is what you're touching on here. I'm keen to avoid a situation where we have a website festering unmaintained, or even just having niggling things wrong with it, and no way for me to pro-actively fix them.
Being easy to use, as an admin, is good... however that doesn't help somebody who's not an admin. Given our large group of (quite a lot of tech savvy) UK OSmers, the contribution model of wordpress might feel a bit restrictive. In fact I've felt this frustration with some of the past SOTM websites. It's not so good for allowing the wider community to pro-actively fix a niggle. I guess what I'm saying is... I'm happy with wordpress as long as I am one of the admins :-) A git repo approach is quite a neat contribution model for this kind of thing. But yeah it's not as easy as editing wordpress. If Rob is going to be the most pro-active maintainer, and he's not comfortable with github, then that's certainly a problem with that idea. I'm imagining an OSM UK website could be quite heavy on syndicated content. It could copy in and present these mailing list posts, the forum, and even have a chatroom (web->IRC). That would help keep it fresh, and relevant to our community with less onus on a restricted set of admin users (I think this idea is a thing we should do regardless of what the rest of the site is built with) The key messages of the website will of course depend on the other discussion we're having here: What are the main goals and key messages of the OSM UK organisation/community? Harry ________________________________ From: Rob Nickerson <[email protected]> To: [email protected]; Talk-GB <[email protected]> Sent: Thursday, 30 June 2016, 18:50 Subject: [Talk-GB] OSM UK site Hi Dennis, Don't worry about hosting issues when comparing the options. The group should probably get its own hosting anyway. The Mappa Mercia one is super easy to use and that's coming from somebody who is not techy at all. To set up the wordpress account all that was needed was to sign in to Webfaction dashboard, select "add new application" and then click wordpress. Ta-da a fully functional wordpress installation! Since then we added an application for simple (static) pages. This is how we drive the maps on mappa-mercia.org. Key things is that whatever we do it is easy to use. The old mappa-mercia site wasn't and we were dependent on one person. When he left the site died. Similarly the current state of the map website is github pages system and is too techie for me. This is frustrating as I now rely on one or two people to do the updates. You need the barrier to be low so that as many people as possible can be involved with keeping it maintained. Rob _______________________________________________ Talk-GB mailing list [email protected] https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-gb _______________________________________________ Talk-GB mailing list [email protected] https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-gb
