IFIWNTechreport
From IFIwatchnet Wiki
News corresponding to the week July 16th-23rd, 2007
IFI Watchnet is encouraging institutional users to switch to individual usernames and passwords, which has more meaning in a web 2.0 context. The institution name and full name are new fields added to the add user form, in order to link usernames to institutions. We are editing those forms to add the correct correspondences.
Arturo, from Uruguay. July 25th, 2007.
Comment from Peter on this development
This is a good start to moving to individual users. But I suggest that it goes into a single "Account settings" page rather then on a separate "additional information" tab. Basic users will probably not click to an additional tab if they don't have to! Putting it all on one page will improve the look and feel and make it easier as well. It should go right up at the top section under "Account information". Also would be nice if the "view" tab showed all the information available to edit - ie full name, organisation, email address, language, signatures, timezone. Will there be a setting for newsletter format (ie HTML or plain text)?
Thoughts on Updating Campaign Pages Arturo and I (Sameer) have been talking about making improvements to the campaign pages (specifically the IMF Campaign page [1] that I am working on). Here's a list of some improvements that could then be added to other campaign pages who desire this functionality:
1) It would be great to have the ability to actually change what the background looks like. Plain white is a better default than others, and I realize that we can upload banners, but it would be nice to have the ability for some "personalization" even if it just means selecting from some design templates... For advanced users, the ability to input in html would be nice.
2) At the moment, the way the blogs are designed (with the exception of the IMF leadership blog), blog postings show up on a main page and are sorted by the individual who posted the entry. For the campaigns pages, it would be great to have a distinct blog, and maybe someone (an Animator) could go and flag those campaign posts that should show up on the main IFIwatchnet blog and then they will be in both places.
3) Wikis such as this one can be a useful tool for campaigns. (This wiki is serving more like a discussion thread than a wiki. I have in mind the use of wikis for the creation and editing of campaign related documents.) But some of those wikis will not be completely public documents (for example, I'm working on a call to action for the October mobilizations that we wouldn't want publicised until it's actually finished). Is it possible to add wiki pages (or links to seperate subsections of these wiki pages) to campaign sites? Is it possible to have some wiki pages password protected with the creator/moderator of the campaign page approving access?
4) At the moment, this is a one page kind of thing. If I want to add new levels (as opposed to one long page) there is no way to do that. With the help of Arturo I've been able to use the document upload functionality (though that is still not intuitive), but ideally we would like to be able to generate new pages, eg ifiwatchnet.org/imfcampaign/IMF_in_Uruguay.html . Is there any way to address this?
That's all I can think of for now. Let me know if I can be of help in implementing any of these ideas. -Sameer.
Comment from Peter on this Campaign pages Great that some thinking is going into this function as it is a key feature of the new Drupal site. Here are some developments that could help and some ideas:
1) First some instructions would be helpful. That is still blank on the wiki and in my poking about it isn't obvious to me how to start a new campaign section on IFIWN. Adding a banner seems straight forward but not creating a new campaign section. There should be links to do that and instructions from the create content link on IFIWN. Like I have suggested for other developments, I think it best if members can create new campaign sections without having to ask the moderators/editors to do it for them. On the fly campaign creation. That will help people start to use it.
2) Branding - Two issues here. I don't know how customisable the templates are - but I don't think we need to prioritise anything beyond having a logo. That is I think already available. The second branding element is that it would be nice to have domain names possible. For imfleadership.org it redirects to IFIWN. But it should be possible to have virtual names/hosting so that if we had a campaign called "IMF out of Nepal" the managers of the campaign can register their domain name www.imfoutofnepal.org to point to the campaign page on the IFIWN site. But instead of redirecting, the URL could continue to read as www.imfoutofnepal.org as you navigate through the campaign pages. I believe this is called "masked URL forwarding".
3) Linking back to IFIWatchnet - providing these pages should also benefit IFIwatchnet. So somewhere prominent (top right corner maybe) there should be a statement "Hosted by IFIWatchnet" and a logo - which link back to the IFIwatchnet homepage.
4) Still think we need a link to campaigns on the top navigation of IFIWN
Thats all I can think of for now. But if I start using a campaign I am sure I will have further ideas.
