Prioritized tasks

Top development priorities

Here are the top development priorities for Ourmedia:

Staging server needs to be restored

Sometime early this past fall, our testing server stopped working -- i never heard a reason why -- and so all upgrades and changes are made on the live site.

This is not optimal, so we need our staging server back.

Hillary and I will be making changes to the stylesheet and need to see how they appear on various browsers/platforms before they go live.

Bid4Vid tie-ins

Work with Hillary to determine appropriate Bid4Vid tie-ins from Ourmedia.

Home page redesign with call to action

JD will work with Hillary to create a call to action on the front page to get members to become producers.

Tags still not working

Just uploaded some new videos, and the tags I assigned still aren't appearing on the media page.

Tags search

When tags are working, we'll need some cluster of tags to appear in the left navigation on all non-channel pages on the site except the producers directory and producer portfolio pages.

Would this work?:

a) tags for all media uploaded in the past month;
b) a tags landing page with the most popular 200 tags in a tag cloud

In addition, we'll need a tag results page for every tag: just a Google-like search results page that shows the title and url for every media page that contains that tag.

Registration form

Here is the Registration page for all Ourmedia members. The form nees:

• styling<br>
• small fixes detailed on Outhink wiki, including next-step call-to-action functionality

Producers directory

Implement Hillary CSS fixes (coming) to Producers directory. See the wireframe on the Outhink wiki.

Also need to know from Markus why (and whether) videos are loading in the background.

Portfolio pages

Need to implement the changes outlined on the Outhink wiki, such as fewer elements in the left nav and the ability to sign in and designate one of your other clips as your showcase video. Hillary can help with styling the tabs at top and the link to the Producers Directory.


Add reel

The "Click here to add a reel to this page" form on the Portfolio page still needs work. Browsing to add a video results in a glitch (unless it's been fixed).

Select to import (previously published media) is a great touch; needs to be sorted differently, starting with video.

Other elements need to be simplified. Hillary can help with styling.

At bottom of form, can we do this?
[Submit and add another reel] [Submit and go to Portfolio page]

Account pages

A lot of the changes taking place on the my settings / Account settings tab need to be discussed.

The Producer information tab is almost there. Need input from Hillary.

CSS styling

Work with Hillary to use CSS to clean up major pages on the site.

Fix comments

We'll be removing the group blog from the front page. When it has its own page, then:

a) When someone adds a comment, it should display this at the bottom:

Comments (1) | add comment

Either: add permalink as well, or change CSS and turn headline into the permalink for the entry.

b) An icon of the person should appear next to the comment.

c) When you're logged in and you've posted a comment, you should see an edit link as well:

Edit | comments (1) | add comment | permalink

d) for CSS styling, here are some great-looking comment styles (JD can mock up a final version with hillary):

http://kino-eye.com/2007/09/26/hidden-truth/ (form only, not the resulting post - nice gray colors)
http://www.seodisco.com/2007/10/01/so-much-social-media-so-little-time-help/
http://www.specializedriders.com/blog/1/post/show/412
http://www.politico.com/news/stories/1107/7097.html
http://www.blogher.com/blogher-2008-reach
http://firstread.msnbc.msn.com/archive/2008/02/10/653700.aspx
http://toddjordan.wordpress.com/2008/03/07/st-louis-and-social-media/

e) For logged-in members who click on Add comment, the body text box now displays this when it should display nothing:

<p><span style="font-size: 10pt; font-family: Verdana;"><font color="#222222"></font></span></p>

f) At the bottom of the page, there needs to be a Next link to take you to Earlier posts.

g) In the form, please add a home page in Comments similar to this ( Name, email, home page, subject, comment):

http://www.edutopia.org/collaborating-create-media-savvy-young-people

h) For non-logged-in users who click on add comment, there should be a log-in option so that their name can be added to the post. The idea is, most people who've registered at Ourmedia usually don't log in; this would let them easily log in, so when they leave a comment, their name will appear, linked to their My Page.

Also, I'm not sure why we have only Preview instead of the Preview and Post buttons.

MSS: Drupal 'comments' won't work for this(they need to be associated with a specific post) and so I will use the blog post form for now. This displays member name and link to profile. Has subject, body and preview. I can customize this form later to display home page instead and to hide other fields on form (e.g., tags).

MSS: I think captcha is a good idea, but we should insist on registration too so as to avoid spam and troll comments. The bar should be high for participation.

JD: Also, when we get some CSS help, this is a cool way to present a commenter's sig, date and name:

http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2007/10/social_network_operating_system.html

Views of published media

The column for the # of views on each user's publishing media
pages is now missing (12-07).

Spacing on blog pages

Related to this is the problem with how blog pages are displaying. For instance, the paragraph spacing is fine on the front page, but not on node pages such as this:

http://ourmedia.org/node/369336

Profile completeness

This would be nice for down the road. When you log into LinkedIn and go to your profile page, it shows a bar with the percent (50%, 70%, 100%) of profile completeness you've attained, based on whether you've entered data in all the major categories.

Fix channels

  • When someone is not logged in, they should see the same channel as a logged-in member, except for private postings. That's not the case, so this needs fixing.
  • When I'm logged in to channels and go to a non-channel page on Ourmedia, usually I'm not logged in and have to do it again. The log-in should carry over to both channel and non-channel pages.
  • There shouldn't be a warning message "No public posts in this group. You must be registered or logged in ... etc." atop any channel when a user who's not logged in comes to the page.

Instead, we should add a notice to the very top of the left nav beneath the log-in field saying, You must be logged in to create a channel or add a video or media file to this channel.

  • When you're not logged in on an add channel or channel item page ...

http://channels.ourmedia.org/node/add ... it says:
Create content.
No content types available.

Need to change it to non-techie speak. I suggest:
Please sign up and join the conversation! (with sign up linking to the registration page)

  • Also, add: Create new channel to left nav

Paragraph breaks, etc.

Looks like these are separate modules:

a) On members' Media pages (like http://ourmedia.org/node/337395), when you add a space between paragraphs in the Description field, the entry combines it into one long paragraph. See: http://ourmedia.org/node/364977 (This is also true for channel items that you create and add to Community talk, like http://channels.ourmedia.org/node/821/edit -- i had to add <p>s.) The following formats should be supported (all should have / versions as well, like <p> and </p>.

<p> <br> <href> <b> <strong> <i> <em> <ul> <li> <ol> <blockquote> <strike> <s> <u> <cite> <code> <dl> <dt> <dd> (not really sure what these last 5 are).

not font size or font color or h2, h3, h4. What else?

b) In blog entries (like http://channels.ourmedia.org/node/719), some of these are supported (like href), some are not. In addition, blog entries should support <img>.

More on tags

Still need to differentiate between media tags and channel tags.

  • Why is a channel tag like blu-ray (with one result) bigger than a channel tag like george w. bush (multiple results)? Should be the opposite.
  • I don't think media page tags are hooked into the tag cloud or taxonomy results yet.
  • We should put up an explanation of two kinds of tags, one for channels and one for everything else.

Simplify channels, channel items, and Producer profile forms

Let's discuss when we get to this point.

Additional items

  • Tags have been faling off Ourmedia since launch

(see http://ourmedia.org/comment/reply/455#comment ) along with the Date of publication.

  • We just received this email, which reflects a longtime need on Ourmedia:

"I wanted to upload my images at ourmedia but I see there is no provision to distribute my work under "Free Art License". It is a very popular license among Open Source community. Creative Commons Share-Alike is good but does not match the copyleft properties of Free Art License. Can you add Free Art License to your list of licenses ?"

This would be most easily handled by adding a free-text field for "Other" kind of license.

  • The hide and display title bars should go sitewide, not just on Channels pages.
  • On the Learning Center front page, let's hide the Learning Center promo in the left nav.
  • Media player. Let's discuss.
  • Auto-start. Some quicktime and WMV videos play automatically when the page is called up (http://www.ourmedia.org/node/312563). We should turn this off. MARKUS: investigating, note that this is actually a WMF.
  • Audio player glitch. On audio pages like this, there's no audio player showing (the sound plays, no way to turn it off): http://www.ourmedia.org/node/15245 . Markus: Fixed.

JD: Actually, no, this still isn't working. Sent you screen shots on PC in both Firefox (no player) and IE7 (missing plug-in).

For new mp3 files posted to the site, they start playing automatically when the page is called up, and there's no player on the page:
http://www.ourmedia.org/node/323599

  • Decouple registration of Archive from editing Ourmedia pages. This is a common complaint by our members. I was signed in as Joe Lasica (full admin) yet couldn't make changes to my video's metadata on our servers because my email address at archive didn't match under this account. When you're logged in and editing metadata on our servers, it shouldn't matter if your Archive identity syncs up properly or not. http://www.ourmedia.org/node/312563 Here's the error message:

You must enter your Internet Archive password before you can upload content. Please do so here.
Your e-mail address and archive.org password are incorrect. You will not be allowed to upload media until you have entered valid information in your profile

  • CSS on comments pages.

Adjust media and text posts per our conversation last week, with headings the same as the front page posts, date and permalink below the post, etc. Maybe play with it on staging and ping me when it's about ready?

On comments, the Submitted by JD Lasica line here should be small (the same size as the add comment | report abuse ), while the comment entry should be larger than it is here. I believe 0.9em. http://www.ourmedia.org/node/315667#comment-11092

  • CSS on channels pages. On the middle area of Channels pages, the type should be adjusted to reflected the type style elsewhere on site (line-height: 150%?, etc.)
  • Immediately beneath the body" text (generally an intro), have a prominent link for "Add a comment"
  • The channels prototype mockup 3 months ago had this (in big type) at the top of the left nav for those who were not logged in: "Log in to participate." So we should do something like that on all the channels pages.
  • Text displaying improperly in channels. In Channels, the text in the Body field should not display immediately below the video. See any video on the Remix Politics channel (the type is obscured). We need a separate window/field to enter revlog info to appear below the video window and above the play bar.
  • Let's add 'Get CC media' search to channels pages below the search field.
  • On channels pages, the "Home" in the breadcrumb trail should be the site's home page, not the front page of Channels.
  • When I revlog a video, I sometimes have to make sure it's not the lead video because clicking on the video doesn't play it. (This is when the object coding appears in the Body field.) In addition, in some cases there is no player button, as with this one:

http://channels.ourmedia.org/sue-teller-mashes-it

  • We should remove the "(About 'Mashup madness')" links in the middle section of all channels. They go to a page saying You are not authorized to view this.
  • Under Remix Politics, let's get rid of Create Story because Create Page does exactly the same thing (unless I'm missing something)
  • The thumbnail field in the create channel items form doesn't seem to be working. When i add the url for a thumbnail (of Bill clinton or teddy roosevelt), it just takes the large screenshot and scales it down, distorting it.

Also noticed that the audio gif i sent you for the 320x240px screen image is appearing as a 60x45px thumbnail as the 4th thumbnail image atop the Channels pages. It should instead be displaying the audio thumbnail that's properly displaying on the Ourmedia home page (and elsewhere on the Channels pages).

  • Add other feeds to Community talk - see what works on Staging.
  • Markus 5-15: planning to make "friendly urls" for channels. eg, ourmedia.org/RemixPolitics
  • Upload page. Embed name and email address on the ourmedia.org/upload page (as chris did in earlier iteration). Markus: actually, I originally embedded it. Chris and JD deleted old form and replaced with new form without carrying forward code for email and name. Basically code must insert information from $user global (assuming user is logged in).

JD: When I signed on as JD Lasica and copied it over, it copied over MY info, not the info for each member. And when I'm not logged in, obviously I can't edit the page. So you'll restore this, yes?

  • There should be a line of space (12-14px) immediately beneath the About this channel title bar, and immediately beneath the end of the About this channel section (to separate it from the "Remix Politics" title bar).

And for mpeg4 movies, shouldn't there be a player as part of the video area?
http://ourmedia.org/node/324179

And avi movies don't have a supported player yet?
http://www.ourmedia.org/node/324479

more feeds >>
so:
more channels >> (with spacing below)

Also, let's eliminate the confusion in lexicon by changing group to channel even in urls like "http://channels.ourmedia.org/group/tracker" and
"http://channels.ourmedia.org/og" (change to
http://channels.ourmedia.org/channels_directory or something like that
  • Channel ownership: How does one share admin. privileges with others on a channel one creates?
  • Buddies aren't working. I had a few dozen buddies a few months back. Now I have none. :(
  • I've noticed several times that when I'm on a page that requires a log-in, and i log in via the fields on that page, I'm taken to my My Page rather than staying on the same page. Shouldn't happen -- you should remain on the same page.

Longer-term development work

  • On channel pages, huge improvement would be to move the Attach and Submit buttons for uploading images to the top area of Channel items pages, in the Images box. If so, then the other image upload areas below could be eliminated. (By the way, I'm finding "File Attachments," with a Browse button and Attach button, much more useful than "Attached Images," where there is no Attach button.)
  • Full tags page. We should have a Tags page in addition to the most popular tags on the front page and channels page, and need to add Tags as an element on Browse media, so probably we should combine these two pages, no? With, say, displaying the 250 most popular tags on the site (a bit more extensive than what Flickr does, followed by the rest of the Browse media page?
  • Our taxonomy pages need work. See for eg:

http://ourmedia.org/taxonomy/term/3614
It plays multiple audio and video files at once. On taxonomy pages, they shouldn't load, if that's possible, and certainly shouldn't play.

  • Audio players on front page:

(a) there should be rows for the title of the work and the artist/producer, especially for streaming music;

(b) need 2nd set of links to download the file;

(c) let's make the links (when a user clicks on those little icons for more info) open in a new window instead of the same window (target="_blank" i assume). It would be natural for a user to click to play a song and then click to find out more info about it, and we don't want the song to stop playing when she does.

  • Archive-related: Expose the transcoded Flash video that the Archive creates for almost all videos uploaded to the Ourmedia collection. Discuss using Flash as the default when it's available. In either case, expose all the versions of video transcoded.
  • under Group notifications (Channel notifications), I'm not clear on what these are (and clicking on them doesn't help), so are these a candidate for a Javascript mouseover that'll provide a one-sentence explanation? If so, let's work on some brief wording:

my unread: feed | page
my channel: feed | page

Also, let's add a divider | since it now looks like "feed page" is a single link.

  • Javascript is still not working with the Register link on inside pages. It has a title but it's not displaying.
  • Need a page showing the most recent members to join Ourmedia. I'd suggest 50 members (icons and links to their My Pages) on a page, with a more button to 3 other pages (for 200 total, or more if that doesn't bog down the system). I like what ilike.com does on their front page (Who's on iLike right now?) and here: http://www.ilike.com/user
  • Related to this: on the Community page (ourmedia.org/community), we could use thumbnails of the 10 most recent members to join Ourmedia, their images, their screen names and a link to their My Page.
  • Sidebar description (logo, etc.) for a Channel should appear in the sidebar of all channel items in that channel.
  • Are Creative Commons 3.0 licenses enabled yet? MARKUS: yes in channels, but not yet with uploaded media. Media change needs to be tested with Archive.org. Not sure what SpinXpress2 is doing.
  • IN PROGRESS. We should have an "add to my channel" icon and link on all media pages, though this may take some doing.
  • MSS: In Progress - Google Search isn't picking up a lot of our content. Compare a search for David Byrne on Google vs. AlltheWeb
  • We should put a Flash player icon and QuickTime 7 icon on media and channel pages. JD has them. Let's discuss.
  • We've had a longstanding bug regarding being able to log into other Drupal sites. I just tried it again and it doesn't work:

PS -- Your new Ourmedia membership also enables to you to log in to
other Drupal -powered web sites (e.g., http://www.drop.org/) without
registering. Just use the following Drupal ID and password:

Drupal ID: Joseph Lasica@
password: nighthawk

Edits to Channel and Channel items forms

See this page.

Development work completed & bug fixes made

  • DONE - There's a glitch on the channels pages that's still there: Click on the Learning Center in the left nav and you get either a page not found or a You are not authorized to view this page, because of the path: http://channels.ourmedia.org/learning-center
  • DONE - note: part of this was due to quotes being used in the artist field. That's a bug and needs to be fixed ASAP. For now I removed the quotes - In IE6 on PC, the 3rd thumbnail (Jon Hammond trio) starts downloading the video when you click the thumbnail instead of streaming it (in Firefox it calls up a dialogue window asking how you want to watch it -- it didn't do that a day or two ago), and the 6th thumbnail (Internet killed the video star) gets me a Plugin not found. (No wonder everyone's turning to Flash!)
  • DONE - sidebar description for about this channel shouldn't repeat below the player.
  • DONE - The type size for all the body text in sidebar should be smaller (.9em if i recall)
  • DONE - Browse by media type: let's lose this on the channels pages
  • DONE - Subscribe to feeds: I suggest we lose this on channels pages, leave it on rest of site. We're trying to eliminate clutter and this is a good candidate to go.
  • DONE - Talk & media stream should change to: Channel talk
  • DONE - Make the thumbnail icons for Ourmedia members map to this.
  • DONE - Let's change heading on front page top center from Media showcase to Producers showcase (per dave).
  • DONE - standardize the type size for Who's online and Newest media (and change Newest Media to Newest media, to conform with our style)
  • DONE - - At the top of the Channels page, can you add Channels explained
  • DONE - - On the home page, can you change the wording and the anchor link from:

(About Media showcase) to (About Producer showcase)

  • after redirecting the profile and image from channels to ourmedia (i.e. we use the one profile and pic for both ourmedia and channels now) i realized that I had to change the profiles to list a person's channels now instead of the old groups.
  • DONE, see post for details. Can we change the default for User comments for all new posts & media items from "Disabled" to "Read/Write"?
  • DONE - Let's add member icons for Community Talk AND for all comments on the site, in a uniform size (let's try 60px x variable full depth). See channels mockup for how this would look, floating to left of headline and comment.
  • DONE (fixed) - Markus knows about the javascript bug with linked images not showing titles.
  • DONE - Fix registration page so it doesn't show list of 200+ channels/groups.

http://ourmedia.org/toboggan/register

  • DONE - When a member creates a channel, a list of his/her channels should appear on the member's My Page. We should also list on his/her My Page all the channels she belongs to.
Links:

Comments and discussion: