Website Plans: Schedule: Road Map
Website Plans
Contents
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Overview – The starting point for documentation about our plans for the website.
- Introduction
- Terminology
- Document structure
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Strategy – Details of our strategy for developing the website.
- Evolution over revolution
- IT and joined-up data
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Your input – We want your help. This is your website; we value your ideas and feedback.
- What are we looking for?
- How to send us your ideas.
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Schedule – When things are going to happen. Time scales, as far as we are able to estimate them.
- Road map
- Time line
- Tasks list
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Participation – A website where you get to take part, rather than passively absorb information, will be more fun and productive. We have plans to make this happen.
- Communication
- Members-only areas
- Interaction
- Contribution
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Facilities – Plans for the website in terms of functionality, useful tools and other applications.
- Social media integration
- Directory of writing groups
- On-line competitions
- Link magazine
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Features – Plans for the behavioural and technical aspects of the site.
- Privacy & security
- People database
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Articles & editing
- Temporal content
- Markdown for content
- Automatic TOC generation
- PayPal integration
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Content – Plans for what articles, pages and other information to have on the site. Examples: news, information, events, competitions, products and services.
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Material
- Revamp "who is NAWG?" area
- Organisation
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Presentation – Plans for improvements and additions to the way the site appears, e.g. its layout, styling and navigation.
- Layout
- Style
- Navigation
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Management – Plans to improve the operational aspects of the site, i.e. the way it's run and maintained, and the way we respond to communications.
- Operations & procedures
- Who does what?
Some of the above titles are hyperlinks.
Click for more detailed documentation.
More will become links as things evolve.
Article Contents
This article sets out the future plans for this website, as far as they are known.
For specific project-related tasks, please see the tasks article. For more general things-to-do, please see the ideas article.
Introduction
Older versions of the website (prior to release 2.4.1, 20-Mar-2014) had a number of shortcomings and limitations. We plan to address these and make improvements.
Time Line ↑
Here are the website releases, along with some major events, shown in reverse chronological order.
| Date | Release | Event / Notes |
|---|---|---|
| ? | 2.9.6 | Legacy website to be decommissioned. |
| ··· | ··· | |
| 03-Sep-2018 | New live site hosted by 1&1. | |
| 03-Sep-2018 | This website was decommissioned from live use. It remains as a legacy reference site. | |
| 31-Aug-2018 | NAWGFest. | |
| 07-Aug-2018 | 2.9.5 | Bug fix for "100" competition software. |
| 23-Jun-2018 | 2.9.4 | Software updates. |
| 14-Jul-2018 | Committee meeting. | |
| 20-Jun-2018 | 2.9.3 | Added support for privacy policy, plus various bug fixes and improvements. |
| 20-Mar-2018 | 2.9.2 | Header, side bar and footer changes. |
| 24-Feb-2018 | Committee meeting. | |
| 16-Feb-2018 | 2.9.1 | Software updates. |
| 22-Dec-2017 | 2.9.0 | Security hardening. |
| 28-Oct-2017 | Committee meeting. | |
| 18-Oct-2017 | 2.8.0 | Front page improvements. |
| 15-Jul-2017 | Committee meeting. | |
| 05-Jun-2017 | 2.7.10 | Displaying articles in a category no longer includes sub-categories. |
| 25-Feb-2017 | Committee meeting. | |
| 13-Jan-2017 | 2.7.9 | Handling for restricted areas (prototype). |
| 29-Oct-2016 | Committee meeting. | |
| 11-Oct-2016 | 2.7.8 | Changes to clarify display of multiple article sets. |
| 04-Sep-2016 | AGM & committee meeting. | |
| 15-Jul-2016 | Committee meeting. | |
| 13-Jul-2016 | 2.7.7 | Introduced writers' resources area. |
| 10-May-2016 | 2.7.6 | Bug fixes and software updates. |
| 18-Apr-2016 | 2.7.5 |
Improvements to [shortcodes]. Multiple software updates.
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| 22-Dec-2015 | 2.7.4 | Social media integration. Logo changed. |
| 06-Sep-2015 | Committee meeting. | |
| 07-Aug-2015 | 2.7.3 | |
| 25-Jul-2015 | Committee meeting. | |
| 03-Jun-2015 | 2.7.2 | |
| 15-May-2015 | Committee meeting. | |
| 14-May-2015 | 2.7.1 | Software packages update. |
| 10-Apr-2015 | 2.7.0 | 100 Word Mini-Tales competition. |
| 31-Mar-2015 | 2.6.4 | Update core & library software. |
| 02-Mar-2015 | 2.6.3 | Tabbed display on front page. |
| 21-Feb-2015 | Committee meeting. | |
| 04-Feb-2015 | 2.6.2 | Migrate the entire site to a new hosting company. |
| 15-Nov-2014 | Committee meeting. | |
| 12-Nov-2014 | 2.6.1 | Improve content filters. |
| 20-Sep-2014 | Committee meeting. | |
| 29-Aug-2014 | Annual writing festival (Warwick). | |
| 12-Aug-2014 | 2.6.0 | Utilise dynamic sidebars and widgets features. |
Future Releases ↑
Planned New Features – General
- Make use of WordPress theme customisation features, to make cosmetic changes easier and avoid the need for code changes.
- Support for writing articles using markdown.
Planned New Features – Appearance
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Add new components to the side bar, such as:
- A PayPal widget to allow subscription fees to be paid.
Planned Changes – Technical
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Make the "NAWG Classic" WordPress display theme into a child theme of "K-Lattice".
This will pave the way towards some of the new features, including:
- Support for dynamic sidebars and widgets.
- Theme customisation support.
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Improve the content filters that are used by WordPress.
Raw content is stored in and retrieved from the back-end database. Before that content is presented on the web pages, a number of filters are applied. The WordPress default filter configuration is unsatisfactory for a number of reasons, so we aim to improve this situation.
In particular:
- Improve auto-paragraphing and line break display. To be honest, the native WordPress handling of these things is a right pig's ear, often resulting in invalid mark-up and mangled content layout. We intend to clean this up by replacing it with a simple and robust system.
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Where possible, corrections for bad mark-up will be applied.
Bad mark-up can often be generated, for example, by pasting data from Microsoft Word into the post or comments editors.
Particular things to address are:
- Invalid element names, attributes and values.
- Elements not properly closed, or incorrectly nested.
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Superfluous elements and attributes,
e.g. useless empty
<span></span>constructs, or useless empty attributes such as in:<form name="">.
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Apply corrections to incorrectly formed URIs (internet and e-mail addresses). Here are some examples:
Bad URI Description Corrected URI http//person.blogspot.com/about-me Missing separator between scheme and domain name. Add colon after scheme name. http://person.blogspot.com/about-me #bWFpbHRvOi8va2V2aW5AbXlwbGFjZS5vcmc=# Incorrect separator between scheme and domain name. Remove double-slashes. #bWFpbHRvOmtldmluQG15cGxhY2Uub3Jn# -
Replacing UTF sequences, international text, and other special characters with named entities, for better cross-browser portability.
For example:
The text "the renewal fee remains at £40" would be encoded as: "
the renewal fee remains at £40", rather than having the pound symbol hard-coded.
Some of the filtering will need to be done each and every time pages are displayed. Other filtering need only be applied when an article or comment is submitted or edited.