island⁹⁴

Notes from Rebecca below on managing nonprofit technology projects

http://aspirationtech.org/events/mntp-sf
http://mntp.aspirationtech.org/index.php/Event_Agenda

…maybe I’ll clean this up someday.

—-
!!!Basic Stages of a Project
1. Initiate
* define project
* talk about start and end points, budget, participants/roles, timeline
2. Plan
* defining scope, requirements, use cases
3. Implement

4. Monitor

5. Close
*how do you know when you’re done with the project you’re working on?

*upkeep/maintenance phase?

*in “waterfall” style projects, there is just one of each step
*in “agile” style projects, the plan -> implement -> monitor cycle repeats
*know which style project it is at the beginning!

—-
!!!Content inventories
For redesign processes, figure out what content and navigation is currently present and how it’s organized. Include things like creation dates and web statistics; talk about the value of old content to users. This can affect how much of the content is migrated, and can give organizations insight into how they intend to communicate vs. how they’re actually communicating. For example, one PM working on the ACLU site inventoried 15,000 pages; the ACLU decided to migrate 8,000 of those, and rethought their style of technical & legal language to a more personal approach.

—-
!!!Scope Creep
*postpone things to phase 2
*define project endpoints in the “initiate” phase
*specifications that include what ‘’won’t'’ be included …read more

Always interesting to see who is using Drupal for their website:

• John Birch Society

I’m partial to the following WYSIWYG editors for Drupal:

• WidgEditor - stupid simple
• TinyMCE - way complicated powerful

But neither of them work well enough for me to want to use them. The trade-off for using these is that it’s easy to make pretty text, but if you ever need to manually edit, it’s incredibly painful. The biggest problem is that they don’t make new lines for paragraph breaks, smashing everything together into one huge, ugly block. And since Drupal has a nice, built-in filter for creating paragraph elements, it’s redundant (and infuriating).

The only markup you need is bold, emphasis, links, pictures and a way to turn it off. Wordpress seems to get it.

CCK’s single checkboxes require a strange configuration in the Allowed Values list:

0
1|Checkbox title

I recently did some Drupal development work for Cambridge Community Television. As part of the really amazing work they are doing combining new media with traditional Cable Access Television, CCTV has been mapping videos their members produce. They call this project the Mediamap.

I was really excited to work on the Mediamap with CCTV because of my long involvement with Cable Access Television, most notably the now-defunct DigitalBicycle Project and the community maintained directory of Cable Access Stations I built and administer: MappingAccess.com. …read more

Island94.org has undergone some revision today; I hope you noticed. I upgraded Drupal to 4.7 and rethemed the site.

Drupal 4.7 adds a lot of really great features, the main one, from a ‘nifty’ perspective is free tagging. This gives a lot more granularity to organizing posts. There is also a lot of nice stuff under the hood. I had been a little lax in upgrading my old Drupal install, so the upgrade also fixes a couple of security issues as well.

The theme is a major change from the old design. I had really liked the woodcut motif that I grabbed from Mark Twain’s Life on the Mississippi but it was starting to show its age. Also, looking under the hood I was always reminded of my own inexperience at the time I put it together. …read more