Saturday, December 19
1-5pm, drop in anytime
Openflows
220A E 4th Street (between Avenues A & B), East Village, NYC
Contact nyc@radicalreference.info if you want to participate remotely
- Are you interested in Radical Reference or already a volunteer?
- Do you have experience with website usability or want to gain some?
- Are you a coder with Drupal, CSS or other web development skills to improve or share?
If you fall into at least one of these categories, please join us!
- What does the Radical Reference site currently do, and what would we like it to do?
- What do we like about the site?
- What do we find frustrating?
The goal of this brainstorming session is to create a wishlist of functions and improvements for the site, and a roadmap for how to implement them.
And stick around after for a little social gathering!
Background: The Rad Ref website has been pieced together over the past 5 years. During this time, the Content Management System we use (Drupal) has gone through 5 major version changes. The Rad Ref website is one step behind, having gone through 4 major upgrades.
Because we were early adopters of Drupal, we found ourselves hitting certain dead ends as the modules and the system as a whole changed. Some things that were thrown together in a hackish manner can now be done simply using the core system.
Our goal is to look at how the site works, how certain features are implemented, and what we need to change.
There are two parts to this process, refactoring and re-implementing.
Refactoring is about modifications to code that do not change the outward appearance of the system, or the addition of new features to make it simpler and easier to maintain. Re-implementing is about changing how things are done, adding new features and making the system work better.
We will start from a fresh installation of Drupal 6, add in modules and configure them to do what we want and then get assistance in converting our data from the existing database into the new structure we establish.
This should provide us with a stable foundation that we can use for the next 5 years.
