Checklist for COA News

Items in green are done (but need testing).

Key Points: General Stuff

1. The website should optimized for all browser types – I think there is some kind spec we can follow to make sure of this
2. The site should be optimized for portable devises. I’m told that our current site does not work at all on blackberries etc… (this is important) – Provisionally done. There's no such thing as optimizing for everything, but the main content loads first. To truly have best practices for mobile devices, we would need to make an alternate theme for small-screen that shows less at a time. This would be an additional cost, but we'll also continue to make sure the current theme works in phones and PDAs etc.
3. Search engine optimization – if you don’t know how to do this let me know I’ll pass on some instructions – this is important, we want google (despite their issues) to pick up our articles when people search from something that is in the title or tagged

Content Management System

1. allow tagging. This should help for searching, as well as search engines
2. Allow us to post in multiple sections – see old system (it would be great if we could post to 3 sections at once – EG. Commentary, video, and politics)
3. RSS feeds for all sections, and perhaps for countries (Canada, USA, Japen etc…), and even popular tags, we will have to take or check off the correct country when we post
4. have a tool box for each article like this:
   • Email to a Friend
   • Login to Comment
   • Print
   • Email Editor
   • Receive COA News headlines by e-mail - done, but in my opinion we should try to keep the toolbox article-specific
   • EASY ADD: bookmark page/site
   • EASY ADD: Syndicate
   • Community tags?
5. List related stories at the bottom of each article, like this:
   

   Related COA Stories

   • Kyoto Protocol Not Enough
   • Another Hypothetical Article
   • A third hypothetical story

   or perhaps something like this:

   Also in Environment:

   • Can Apple and Tech Industry be Green?
     Tara Lohan
   • Further Hypothetical Article
     Hypothetical Author

   More stories by Hypothetical Present Author

   Health RSS Feed
   Main COA News RSS Feed

6. list articles by authors: http://www.dominionpaper.ca/author/justin_podur
   -automatically link author name to author page
7. Promotional tools at the bottom of articles
8. when posting, have a checkbox when posting content, that will label article as COMMENTARY – like a button that appears at the top of the article or something - This was done with a category, as above, allowing multiple categorization of articles
9. On our current site articles from affiliates include a logo at the top, and link/description at the bottom. At the moment we cut and paste html codes to input these items. If there is a way to automate this so that we can choose an affiliate from a drop down menu that would be great!
10. automatic mailing lists (Ben: our current mailing list system is phplist – it really sucks up a lot of energy and is problematic in many ways. If Drupal could automatically email subscribers articles from particular sections that would be amazing!)
    
11. drupal e-mail notification of new content based on category - not a problem: http://drupal.org/project/subscriptions
    • This is currently suboptimal, and needs testing. To subscribe to a category, you have to go to "My Account" and go to a Subscriptions tab and then a Category subtab. (subscriptions/taxa). UPDATE: RSS feeds at least can be done from the done from the article toolbox.
12. comments on all content (video comments too). - By video comments, we mean comments on videos, right?
13. Article rating feature
14. Article and headline submission by users
    • Headlines are articles featured by their headline. They should be news briefs etc... but also news items from other sources with just the headline, part of the article and a link back to the source - in order to flexibly move from headline to article, they are implemented as the same content type, Article, which can be specially categorized as a headline. If this proves more confusing than convenient, we can make a separate content type.
15. Space for review of submitted articles and headlines (What GNN calls the Yard)
16. Notify editors when submitted headlines have 5 votes or more (we will then authorize to go to the front page).
17. "Scroller" for video sections – See mock up
18. Top banner should be easy to change if I want to (I would like to not have to ask you or someone else to do it for me). –it would also be cool if we could have a few banners rotating

Wish List

(stuff I would like at some point but are probably out of range for this project)

1. An interactive map of the world where users could select a particular region and see the content for it. Look on left side here: http://globalresearch.ca/
   -A few people have asked for a section that just lists related to Canada
   • Possible starting places
     • regions + flags of the world helpers: http://drupal.org/node/63097
     • Would a simple optional region category list be a fairly good start?
2. Make Affiliates page searchable – so that users can search by keyword, like environment, progressive etc…
   • Users can use sitewide or advanced search to do this now, to provide a search form set up to search by node type automatically, here's the starting point that we could perhaps get to work and turn into a module: http://drupal.org/node/68571
3. using RSS feeds from all affiliates, make a headline search engine – so search engine that searches all the recent headlines from all our affiliates. For example, someone could search “Iran” to see all the articles from all our affiliates on that topic (I would like to have this service for myself personally)

From the Mock-ups

• Get involved block (needs to have appropriate links for logged in users)
• Recent comments block
• Affiliate feature block
• Most discussed content block
• Most viewed block
• Most e-mailed block

Late-breaking requests

1. Could we have an Add to Any button automatically added to each post: http://www.addtoany.com/webmasters/
   -seems like a single button for all the services people use. It's still good to have others available as you do so that they are right there and accessible, but adding this, will make everything available.
2. Block with tabs for recent content, popular content, etc. - http://groups.drupal.org/node/2981
   • Burnt a little too much time on the fancy stuff already, implementing as separate sidebar blocks for now.

Roles

1. The admin who can change banners add pages etc... (you, me, one other person).
2. Editors: don't need to be able to add pages or banners, but need to be able to add content to any section of site, they should also have ability to authorize submitted content to the front page. - Promotion to front page will be done by moving to the Feature category... if we want people to classify by Health, Politics, etc but not have access to Feature we'll have to separate Feature and Featured Feature into another category.
3. Users: can submit content, rate content, comment etc... and do whatever they want with their own FSTV profile. - We have two classes of users, authenticated with these privileges and trusted with a few more, such as uploading pictures.

Final Requests

So the website, to me it just needs some cleaning up, a few new themed sections, and we are ready to go. As you know I've kind reported to volunteers, our board, and members that the site is going live very soon. Can we get the basics wrapped up by say Tuesday?

A couple notes:

The text in the titles seems a bit too close together from line to line

We don't need to right away, but after launch a key item is to have that automatic email system were people can have articles from different topics automatically sent to them at once a week intervals. Maybe also the option to have the main features and headlines sent daily.

looking forward to launch,