Re: Software overhaul? - Frontend experience

On 7 Jun 2013, at 15:08, Jonathan Garbee <jonathan.garbee@gmail.com> wrote:

> The current state of WPD in terms of software is very poor. A lot of issues have been fixed over the last few months, but overall the system as a whole isn't up to what most of us seem to think the standards should be. A few of us have been experimenting with different platforms and seeing if they would meet what we think WPD would be. However the progress has been seemingly slow and without real community discussion of what the standards should be that are being thought about. That is changing.
> 
> We need to discuss what the contributor experience should be like and formalize a set of goals for how everything will work and interact. This way as we are analyzing possible solutions, we can find the one that best suites those end goals. After a few months of being live we have spotted many pain-points for contribution, so taking that knowledge we need to figure out the most fluid way for contributors to work because what we have now simply doesn't cut it.
> 
> What do you all think that the contributor experience should be like? If you can point to example pages online that show the workflow you're thinking of. Remember that this conversation is not about backends at all, just about how we think contributors should interact from the front-end.

I think how it currently is, is now not too bad, although I worry that the sessions issue was fixed too late, and has put a lot of people off. It still occasionally rears its ugly head for me, for example last week it lost we two hours work, which annoyed me immensely.

Other points:

* While the site is now functional, it still feels very clunky, with long loading/saving times. I'm not sure how much we can do about this, whether it is just unavoidable to some extent for a site of this magnitude.
* It needs to accept HTML as the input language. I'm starting to find the Wiki markup to be a barrier, even though I used to like it.
* We need to make sure the templates are all present, and other such holes are plugged.
* I'm still a bit worried about the beginner's material, and beginners finding their way to material that will help them, but I can accept that we need to do the CSS Props first. Then we can concentrate on beginner's stuff.

Received on Wednesday, 12 June 2013 07:28:25 UTC