Notes on functionality for the accu-website
We'd like a system to support:
- Ease of Use
- Ease of Publishing
- Ease of Submission
The next milestone is to have use cases and wireframes to present to the next committee meeting, which will be sometime in September.
- Q. How much prioritization should we have done by then? Moscow?
- Q. How much feasibility work should we have done by then?
- Member
- Non-Member
- Editor
- Committee Member
- Journal Editor
- Conference Committee Chair (Members?)
- Membership Secretary
- Mailing List Moderator
- Advertisers
- Advertising Officer
- Local Group Organisers
We took a look at some of the pages surrounding account info for Members. Though it mostly works, it's hard for users to find, and clunky when they do.
We need to decide whether it's feasible to set up a new site that delegates this stuff to the existing one. I think doing so would go against our aim of making the site easy to use, but might allow us to make some visible progress. I suspect that doing a new membership system would take a lot of effort.
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As a Member I want to update my mailing info so that the journals reach me
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As a Member I want to renew my subscription so I can keep benefiting
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As a Member I want to control how you contact me, so I don't feel I'm being spammed
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As a Member I want to see a receipt of my last payment, so I can commit tax fraud
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As a Non-Member I want to find out about the benefits and costs of Membership, so I can decide whether to join
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As a Non-Member I want to join the ACCU so I can take advantage of the benefits
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As a Membership Secretary I want to do loads of reporting things...(do we need to go into this)?
We saw a little of how difficult it is to add an article, and how the result is plain and boring. We imagined that initially all committee members and members of the journal teams should be able to easily post news articles. Ideally the journal articles would be available to the system in the same way as news articles (though CVu will be behind the paywall), rather than being tucked away in an archive.
(Sorry about the 'curation' nonsense - I'm trying to prevent premature focus on a single homepage. We will have articles linked to from the homepage, but eventually we could have a separate articles page, or a page for each journal, or a set of topic pages...)
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As a Non-Member I want to see a selection of articles to get a feel for what ACCU is about.
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As a Non-Member I want to see a recently curated selection of articles so I can see that ACCU is alive.
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As a Non-Member I want to be able to find articles I might be interested in.
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As a ? I want Non-Members to see that paywalled articles exist, and a little about them, so they can see a benefit of joining.
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As an Editor I want to import all the journal article archives so that I have a rich selection from which I can choose material to promote.
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As an Editor I want to automatically create articles from each issue of the journals so that I always have fresh material to promote.
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As an Editor I want to add new articles so I can publish news.
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As an Editor I want to be able to create rich articles with images and consistent formatting, so that I can be proud of my work.
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As an Editor I want to be able to easily curate a selection of articles so I can keep it fresh.
The current mailing lists sit outside of the CMS-backed website, and are managed by Mailman. This means that we found lists that we know exist were not shown on the website. Also, it's hard to ensure that only authorised members can join.
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As a Non-Member I want to join public ACCU mailing lists so I can join the discussion
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As a Member I want to join private ACCU mailing lists so I can join the discussion
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As a Committee Member I want all mailing lists advertised on the website, so that we attract people to ACCU
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As a Non-Member I want to see the archives of public mailing lists, so I can find out what sort of discussion goes on
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As a Member I want to search the archives of mailing lists, so I can find that cool thing I only half remember
The book review homepage is a boring looking search box. It hides that we have ~1900 book reviews. We'd like to an attractive, frequently changing, display of new/topical reviews at the entry point. Then easy ways to search and browse the collection, by title, author, subject, journal...
We should allow members (non-members?) to post book reviews direct to the site (whether they got the book from us or not). They'll need to be reviewed by an editor before they go live. We wished for a workflow system for reviewing submissions, where editors can claim an entry to review and either accept/reject/return to queue. And an alert system for items that have been in the queue too long.
(Maybe - do we think these are useful?)
This bit of the site is one of the most successful. Other than a wish that it looked more modern, we imagined improvements where we could view the sessions in different ways: either via the schedule, or browse/search by session title, speaker. We could make more of the videos and slides that we have after a conference - we should certainly link to them, and if we could embed then it would add some colour to the site.
We noted the constitution page. We should have details of the committee with photos and contact details. We should make minutes and agenda available here.
We have a calendar, but it's not really used. We should have one. We'd like to see conferences and local meetings here, and other stuff of interest. Maybe anyone can contribute, but entries are reviewed before publishing? We should have a way to highlight upcoming events (probably on the homepage). We imagined that we'd be showing title, description, url, location, date & time and organiser for each event.
Articles will be able to link to events, should events be able to link back to articles? e.g. experience reports...
We could probably use some help working out what's needed here (Paul G?). All past projects have a mailing list, some had wikis (possibly hosted off-site), and some produced articles at output.
We briefly looked at the links and blog feed (where we aggregate blog entries from elsewhere) sections. I don't think we had strong feelings about them - if we're to have them we really need them to be updateable, and to have someone to look after them.
I don't think we discussed the local groups page. Do they need more support? More pages, articles and events, all under control of the group organiser?
Advertising - is Seb selling space on the site? Does he need to administer campaigns? Is he using an ad-serving platform to do that, and do we need to continue to support the same one?
We'd like confidence that we can recover from a disaster. We're in the dark about current practices.
We believe there's only one (virtual?) server running the site + mailing lists. Is this sufficient?
The current WorldPay system mostly just works. We hand off all payment detail processing to WorldPay, so I don't believe we need to worry about PCI-DSS. Are there any reasons for looking for others to add to the mix?
We should have access to the code, and a build system to run up a version of the site for testing and development. We mustn't use live user's data for this, so it is different from taking a backup and restoring it elsewhere.
Currently we don't use HTTPS. All usernames, passwords and subscription information (name + addresses etc.) are sent over HTTP in the clear. A (prospective-?) member once mentioned they didn't like that.