Website Meeting Minutes 11-19-11
Location: Dunkin Donuts by Woodruff Park

Time: work session 5-8pm, Meeting 8-9pm
Location: Dunkin Donuts behind starbucks at Woodruff Park.

Attendance: Andrew V, Andrew Z, Jimmy, Shana, Matt

–

Overview of Last Week:

Avery from IT Infrastructure met with us last week to propose the IT Infrastructures proposal to the Website Team. The proposal is that we abandon wordpress due to the difficulty surrounding the ability to transfer servers with wordpress. Options presented by the IT team were Drupal and Joomla. Both demo sites will be set up to match the current site as close as possible by the IT team and presented to the Website Team for review by this Saturday.

Due to this new information the Website Team elected to spend the remainder of our last Saturday Work session working on getting WordPress transferred to both of our test servers. We continued throughout the week and were successful on two total transfers to the Mayfirst server by Monday, then we set up a step-by-step system for transferring our site. Avery’s server was officially fixed and error free at 4pm 11-18   whoohoo!

New News:

Shana has spoke with the NYCga Internet group about Drupal and why they chose WordPress+Buddypress over Drupal or Joomla. The full convo will be available at the meeting, but to sum it up: WordPress+Buddypress was chosen because Drupal developers are in short supply, WordPress is simpler for the masses to operate and modify in a short amount of time, and it fills an immediate need for the occupiers.

However, NYCga is currently working on a Drupal site that will combine all the Occupations and General Assemblies on one site and will have a one click install for other occupations that wish to install it separately on their own server. They have made the test site and the wiki for discussion on it available to us as well as a wiki for their current WordPress+Buddypress site. Even though they have dedicated a single team to working on the Drupal site, they don’t expect it to be ready for another 3-4 months.

UPDATE: Website – Access to Post – The Process

It was clarified at the last BottomLiners meeting that If anyone comes to us for access to post, an email account, or wanting an additional Group added we should confirm with Process@occupyAtlanta.org Process keeps track of what has been decided by the GA’s, therefore they are best suited to inform us. If there is a disagreement or conflicting information, this will need to be taken to either the GA or more committees for Clarification, (we are not the deciders of such things).

First Item on the Agenda to Discuss:
Our time at our current live server is expiring soon. If we have consensus to do so, we need to create a fool proof plan for transferring this coming week to Mayfirst totally (time, date, etc)
note: there are 50 other occupations hosted on Mayfirst and our live site is running smoothly and error free there now. They do have mailing lists there and all the other server necessities. Let’s discuss it and come to a consensus as a group.

Andrew V – It’s important that we keep the live site on a Comercial server and use personal servers as test servers only.

Consensus to move live to Mayfirst and use Avery’s Server as a test server. Andrew V will notify IT Infrastructure of our consensus, then if all is okay we will set a date to transfer. An Event will be posted on the website “Site Maintenance” for that day and time asap after IT agrees. A full plan was laid out to do this along with assignments of each task.

Consensus – If you install a plugin, only you edit/update that plugin because you know that plugin best. If you edit Code, add in notes that you edited that code and what that edit does. It would be good to document the changes as we make them in a Doc, we will try this. We would also really like a Permanent Wiki to document How To’s for the Website Team.

Shana – I think any major changes from this point forward should be posted on the website as mockup before implementing, unless they have already been on the agenda/task list for several weeks.

Project Report Backs: (what have you worked on, what have you finished)

Completed Projects:
- Mayfirst is a live fully functioning error free test server.
- Avery’s Server: fully functioning and error free 
- Events and Headline News: Shana – by request, added a fancy box to balance out the latest news from headline events and main page posts at the top of the main page.
- WP Comments: Shana – Resolved. It was a conflict with a spam protection plugin.
- All Pages and SideBar GA Locations automatically reflect Today’s GA location.
- Group Docs: Shana – fully functioning on Mayfirst will use it there after live transfer.
- Email/sms Notification Option and Reply by: Jimmy – fully functioning on Mayfirst will use it there after live transfer.

Projects that Still need work:
- How To pages, Admin and Regular: Shana – been adding new items as they arise from questions sent to website@occupyatlanta.org ScreenCasts with Sound would still be nice to have if anyone wants to help that would be awesome.
- BP floating NavBar: Shana – was able to change only the items under the “Dashboard” dropdown. Wording on BP nav bar needs to match wording on the main nav bar. Still need to change – Groups to Committees and Groups, Activity to Updates and Announcements
- Mobile Version: Billy – Roman ? Plugin needs serious format improvements.
- Browser Compatibility: Billy – ? IE needs to match Chrome (at least more so than the way it looks currently)
- RSS Activity Feed at the bottom of the Main Page: Do we want it, is it necessary? Can we make it better so that it serves more of a purpose? Shana has modified it some and has put two extra volunteers (Amy and Aditya) working to fix the issue where it shows the short code for Videos, Photos, and Links. If it could look more like the real Activity page, that would be much better, but is this possible? Another task to work on is the sidebar feed has even less formatting than the main page feed

New Tasks: (what needs to be worked on or what needs to be fixed that wasn’t mentioned in Report Backs)
- Group Communication: Do we want to use an email List that is hosted on our website server or do we want to continue using Google Groups for Group Communication? Consensus to use Google Groups until we are clearly on a permanent server.
- Nav Bar: Assigned to Andrew Z – stretch it out across the entire bar so it’s neither on the right or the left, then move Home button to the right side. (ipad and iphone make this difficult do to their browsers)
- Activation: Assigned to Jimmy – make the process more streamlined. people are getting confused. edits have to be done in php.
- Welcome Pack for new help – Assigned to Andrew V
- Wiki to document HowTo’s for the Website Team – Assigned to Andrew Z
- Group Choice for Events: add the option on the Dashboard form. Tabled for now.
- Discuss new feedback about the website, come up with solutions. (FB Like Button – Tabled to next meeting)