July 8 2010 Tech Meeting

Tech Meeting Minutes 7/8/10

Arbab Hassan, Stephen Press, Greg Miller and Marilena Tsangaroulis in attendance.

Meeting commenced at 10:00am and lasted till 12:30pm

Below Agenda was distributed: 1. Review of progress and milestone 2 deliverables.

2. Approval process for Article publishers: Need to get confirmation from content committee whether a user who is looking to publish article needs to be asked more questions beyond what we are asking them in their profile. The questions being asked in a user's profile is attached to this email.

3. Replacing top navigation link: Would like to discuss if replacing the "Tools" link on the top navigation with "News" or "Events". This is because the site will have users posting events and news, which needs to be accessed easily and quickly. The site will, however, not have a lot of tools (or widgets) to start off with. We will still feature "Tools" on the homepage but I feel a section such as "News" would be more appropriate in the top navigation.

4. "Regional Content" section on the homepage: We had to implement it slightly differently from what we talked about last week. Attached is the new version of the homepage with the "Regional Content". The reason we did this was to show Regional Content to a user without having the user click on a tab. We need the tech committee to review and sign off on the design.

5. Finalizing the width of the website: We had designed all the wireframes planning to create a site with the standard width of 960px. However, when benchmarking other sites (cnn.com, yahoo.com, redcross.org,) we found that they use 972px. (Interestingly some popular sites like MSN.com still use 960px). So we would like to use 972px as the fixed width of the site. 12px is hardly noticeable but we want the site to be comparable to the most popular sites on the web.

6. Discuss News section implementation: Similar to how Yahoo shows news on their homepage. There are two ways a user can submit a news article - a. posing a direct link to another site, and b. writing a blurb about the news article and then referencing the source of the news. We want users to use method 2 as much as possible because other users can comment on the news post and discuss it in the forum, which in turn will generate more content. We need tech committee to sign off on this structure. Also, please answer the following question: will OurMed have RSS feeds coming into their news section? If so, we need content committee to provide some possible feeds.

Summary of what was discussed:

1. Only a bureaucrat can choose what featured articles are shown on the homepage. A static image must accompany the article and the images will scroll but when the mouse goes over the scrolling will pause and user can click on that article to read more. Question is to make it look like yahoo or webmd?

2. Implementation of "How I'd like to use OurMed" section; part of registrant_types

3. Subscribing to newsfeeds

4. New articles must go through approval process (as well as the person writing them). If person has already been approved then they can move the article into live space instead of a sandbox.

5. Locking people out who use the Rich Text editor so that the templates and references don't get messed up.

6. Blog articles should only use Rich text editor?

7. Regional Content: when a person writes an article it will initially be tagged with IP mapping which will map to a country which will generally map to a region. For example Latvia will be mapped to Europe. After more articles are written may switch to zip codes but on each edit page there will be a check box to select which region that article applies to

8. ACTION POINT: removal of the WYSIWYG editor so that templates and references can stay intact. To address issues with the Rich Text Editor (RTE), Blueliner agreed to remove the FCK WYSWIG editor plugin from the current OurMed.Org site. To do this, OurMed will give them server access. Thank you Arbab!

9. Implementing polls on the homepage for people to take