What is Gnomepal?
- User-centric
- Enable small communities (50, not 5 million)
- Use semantic urls – the user should know where they are
- Last.fm – you listened to a song – which of your friends & which of my friends have listened to that song?
- Needs to be modular
- Easy for non-geek users to build – they shouldn’t have to know what’s running, just know that it works.
- This is a product for people who want to go beyond a blog to a community.
- Need blogging, advertising, profile as basic functionality to start with
- Build slow & smart & clean
- Independent developers could use this as a starting point for their community
- Make things easy. Reveal relationships & connections. Reduce clicks.
Primary Goals for today
- Define 5 objectives to work on
- Break into small groups and sprint work (1hr/2hr)?
- Re-gather and discuss
- each person should have time to speak on their thoughts. Continue or not to continue? Move to smaller # of objectives or do we have time to continue at this rate?
- Small doable, actionable tasks
Adam (technical lead) comments:
- Need to narrow this down a bit
- Make user content belong to the user, instead of the larger blog
- While still being able to expose elements of the larger site
- Use Organic Groups as a module
Michael (project lead)
Goals
- User profile
- tagging
- Who’s close by?
- Who’s like me? (Relationships)
- Message board
- Comment form (shoutbox/pm)
- Beef up organic groups (which does some of this stuff)
- add in contact mechanisms
- drag & drop elements
Design for the vertical the community is in, not for the individual user. Customization on individual level can be supplied after. So design for community NICHE.
Building a tool that communities can use to focus on the user.
Bram: Organic Groups is a huge project with a lot of maintainers. Dangerous to touch it because it’s so complex. It might help us in the short term, but long-term might be tough to deal with legacy issues.
- Find out which of these goals are already possible using existing modules. Compare with what we want. (‘Gap Analysis‘).
Organic Groups
- want to implement rapidly
- long term is it appropriate?
- Don’t disrupt legacy code base
- Each user an organic group (not doable?)
- need an architectural assessment of the capabilities of organic groups
- map capabilities of OG (or any module) to the capabilities that we need
- figure out the delta between the capabilities we need & the ones available
- configurability is not easy
- Bram is willing to lead a breakout group on this
- what are the capabilities we want?
- what’s already out there?
- Dell IdeaStorm.com allows users to vote on the features they want
- Hans will set up Drigg
What features do we want?
- URL path
- Blogs Content
- User profiles
- includes activity streams
- chat
- if they’re selling their own products
- affialiate stuff
- id/username/
- currently using Bio
- UserNode is a possible alternative; turns users into nodes
- Advertising
- General purpose ad network serving in rotation
- Extend to API
- Media Gallery (audio/video/photo)
- Ratings in general (all content)
- Q&A
- Groups
- Points
Who wants to do what
- Bram – IA
- Angel – Advertising high level
- Eric – superuser/testing
- Scott – inner workings
- Andy – theming (un-Drupal-fying)
- Michael – help w/ prioritization & features, user needs; wants clarity around user experience
- Chris: help us figure out what people expect in a community. We need a roadmap.
- Stuart – can help out with user experience stuff
Scott: there’s a hard way to do things in Drupal, but they’ll save us headaches down the road.
Chris: let’s stay away from hacks
Advertising
- Restrict to systems with an API
- Because it’s easier
- Amazon
- AdSense
- Kontera
- Community owner will decide where ads run
- User splits may depend on
- # points, # blog posts, age, etc.
- Blocks can be defined as hidden or shown
- Template determines positioning
- Splits are determined by the ComManager
- Affiliate links are pre-populated w/ account owner’s preferred links
- If the ComManager doesn’t define an affiliate account, $ can go back to foundation
- Give the option to donate X% of ad traffic to foundation
- Define different percentages of revenue by role (& individual?)
- Want to know which of my users is making me the most money?
- Could know by traffic stats?
- Or maybe track by URL
- No flash ads (this could be a configuration option)
- Theme background color needs to be tied into ad color (at least for AdSense)
- Configuration option: load ads in same window or new browser window
Relative blocks can not be sacrificed (Related posts, Related users, etc.
Can users bring their own widgets in?
- This is sort of built in to Drupal
- Community owner decides who can add custom content
- Allow certain users permission
Roles: Want to have high granularity of permission settings. Define capabilities & activities, not just whether you can or can’t use a module.