Fast-track site: The Hare 

Platform

• WordPress (PHP5) and MySQL
• Justification:
  • Of those who have responded with interest thus far to be a part of the development of the fast track, it is the platform which the most of our group have experience with and desire to work with
  •  From the community standpoint, it offers the lowest barriers to entry for non-developers to get involved. It could also be a tool that they use for their own websites / blogs in the future.
  • There are only 2 or 3 regional groups using Joomla and there is no BM.org goal to have standardized platform.
  • There really isn't that much inter-regional communication that would mandate that standardization.
  • We are developing the slow track solution as our long-term target so the interim solution is more about speed and simplicity.

Core concepts

• Ease of Use
  Whether it is visitors (trying to find and share information from the site), contributors (seeking to add information to it) or administrators (managing the structure / consistency), we must always consider this.
  
  
• Avoid feature creep
  The vision for the fast track is to replace and simplify the current web platform(s) that we use. The functionality discussed in the survey monkey / Kindling was great but are concepts best left for the long-track development. Once the fast track system has stabilized with the core functionality (see next item) we can look at some incremental improvements while the long-track process gets in gear.

Functional Requirements

• Accessible, understandable content administration with basic role management
  This is all provided "out of box" by Wordpress. But we can take it a step further
  • Re-organize the content so that nothing is more than 1 - 3 clicks from the landing page
  • The navigation process between different sections is consistent / the hierarchy is more logical.
  • Create a "submission form" so that anyone can send the content authors info if they don't want to learn for themselves
  • Put together very simple 5 minute screencast tutorials showing how to do any of the basic actions with the site
  • Set up "drunken demonstration" nights to give hands on training for those who want it.
    
  • Anyone can request a login to add information and those who have proven capable will be made editors to revise / approve changes.
    
    
• Content Pages
  •  We will have a sign-up form that is manually approved to give a user a "subscriber role" which has no authoring rights.
  • This will allow us to define whether a given piece of content is public (event notice / drink nights) or private (event planning details)
  • Re-organization of the content and co-ordinate loading it into the new platform when ready
    
    
• Event Listings
  • Identify all types: Regional Events, Drink Nights, Meetings, Irregular events (Santarchies), Ongoing activities (garden, poi, etc)
  • Public form that anyone can submit potential event listings which might be of interest to Burners.
    
    
• Photo Galleries
  • At a minimum look to re-skin the Gallery2 based pictures.burnon.ca site to be consistent with the new site.
  • Preference would be to use WPG2 plugin to integrate them and bring onto one hosting platform.
    
    
• Basic Facebook Integration
  Investigate what easy ways there are to let people promote info from Burnon.ca to their Facebook.
  
  
• Future functionality
  Can be added after launch (polls, photo of the day, etc)
  

Extensions

• PHP - GD
• Wordpress plugins to be identified
• WPG2 - Wordpress + Gallery2 integration plugin