Loomio
Tue 1 Dec 2015 10:23PM

Towards a New CCANZ Website

MM Matt McGregor Public Seen by 366

The existing CCANZ was built in June 2012. Since then, we've tweaked the site on a number of occasions as the priorities of the project have changed. This has, predictably enough, left us with a Franken-site, one that does not work well on phones, and one that also lacks a consistent design.

MM

Matt McGregor Tue 5 Jan 2016 10:06PM

Hi all - thanks for contributing to this discussion. On balance, it seems that we should stick with Wordpress, for reasons outlined above. We don't have much of a budget or any in-house technical expertise to speak of, so we need to play it safe, even if there are more technically sophisticated / elegant options out there.

In other news:

I've spoken with Jem, our designer, who is going to provide a quote. Jem is also going to investigate themes, to ensure that any design decisions are made with a knowledge of how simple / complex they will be to implement. She's relatively technical - certainly more so than me - so she'll be able to provide a good foundation on which to contract any more technical WP implementation.

I've also spoken with Maarten Zeinstra, a technical lead from CC Netherlands, who recommended continuing with Wordpress. He noted some potential fishhooks - like not integrating the design and development, and forgetting to use a 'child theme' - though I think our approach with Jem will get around that.

WM

William Mckee Wed 6 Jan 2016 4:22AM

That's fine about sticking with WordPress. I would still like to help where I can.

I emailed Creative Commons Int weeks ago asking for the wordpress xml export of the site but got nothing back. How do I get hold of them for this?

Here are some more ideas.

Websites should not exceed in size the major works of Russian literature. http://idlewords.com/talks/website_obesity.htm

Replace png/jpeg files with svg/html5 canvas. Where possible.

MM

Matt McGregor Mon 11 Jan 2016 8:22PM

Hi @richardmclaren - sorry for late reply. Did you know it's on Github? CC Int are moving more of their work there: https://github.com/creativecommons

I'll put you in touch with Jem now, to see where you can help out. Thanks!

MM

Matt McGregor Mon 11 Jan 2016 8:23PM

Sorry, that was for @williammckee!

MM

Matt McGregor Wed 13 Jan 2016 9:25PM

Some inspiration: One open org that has done a nice job of refreshing its site is SPARC: http://sparcopen.org/

WM

William Mckee Fri 12 Feb 2016 11:28PM

So it seems Creative Commons is moving towards a static website. In 2015 they developed a Jekyll site.

New CC website

https://github.com/creativecommons/www2015

The site is a Jekyll site.

MM

Matt McGregor Sat 13 Feb 2016 9:40PM

Yep - that's right. CCHQ moved to Jekyll since hiring some technical staff last year, and after, more broadly, the new CEO came from Mozilla.

The technical capacity of the affiliate network is different - hence, the continuation with WP. That's my understanding of the situation, anyway.

DS

Danyl Strype Tue 10 May 2016 10:25AM

In the first few months after we first set up the cc-nz email list, and again when I held meet-ups for CC folk in a few different cities, we had a number of technologists offer pro-bono support for a CC ANZ website based on free code from mature open source projects. If only there was a platform - some kind of cross between crowdfunding and timebanking - where people could list their skills and experience, and offer a certain number of unpaid hours per week/ month/ year to a not-for-profit project! If we knew how many people, with what skills between them, were able to commit to how much time, we could run both the CC ANZ site itself and the NZ Commons site as a community-driven open source projects, perhaps sharing a common codebase with CCHQ.