Appropedia:Site development/priorities

< Appropedia:Site development
Revision as of 14:01, 11 February 2010 by ChriswaterguyBot (talk | Contributions) (moving DEFAULTSORT tag down adjacent to categories (less confusing))

This is a proposed plan for the development of new features on Appropedia. New features are tested first on the development site.

If you can help, please leave a message on the talk page, or email chriswaterguy at appropedia dot org.

There are many features that would be nice to have (see Appropedia:Desired features). Our current priorities, in rough order, are:

  1. WYSIWYG editor - FCKEditor looks very close, but not ready yet. We need a replacement for Uniwiki, which is proving to be a problem for some editors, and which clashes with Mediawiki 1.14. So either we work with wikiHow on accelerating the implementation of Wikia's WYSIWYG editor code (which contains a lot of wikia specific hooks) or we find an alternative interface (any suggestions?)
  2. New skin - very important to make Appropedia an enjoyable and usable site for visitors.
  3. Social features: better integration with network sites such as WiserEarth and GlobalSwadeshi, and better ways of monitoring activity and engaging with people in Appropedia - mw:Extension:SocialProfile?. (Also: better display of RSS feeds, so people can display their blogs in their userspace; Fan mail; OpenSocial)
  4. Adding semantic features without some of the non-user-friendly aspects of Semantic MediaWiki. How does SMW work with FCKEditor? Which features of SMW should we turn on? (Off: Inline semantic information is probably confusing to newbies unless handled very cleverly in WYSIWYG. On: Allowing users to view the intersection of categories would be a very useful feature. On: Project tracking.)
  5. Fix RecentChanges so it's possible to view more than 14 days.
  6. A box on the navbar letting people easily email friends about the page they're viewing. "Tell a friend about this site. Email addresses will not be saved or used for any other purpose."
  7. Map/geotagging features. (What do we want? Allow searching by distance from location...)
  8. Develop a plan for grading articles and flagging them according to accuracy, reliability, usefulness. This raises many issues, including the weighting given to ranking by regular users compared to "expert" users. The Flagged Revisions extension is likely to be important, and so is the voting extension used on .
  9. mw:Manual:wgForeignAPIRepo - allows us to specify another wiki to pull images from.
  10. mw:Extension:MultiUpload - speed file upload.
  11. ParserFunctions - the extension, or whatever gives Wikipedia the logical functions in templates, that we don't have.