OK - as I learn more about how to configure the site, I am changing stuff around a bit. Workflow is a mapping out of the procedure for doing some task which outlines the steps you need to take in order including any decisions you need to make along the way. This morning I set all the different content types (blog, book page, forum topic, image, page, poll, and story) to *NOT* appear on the front page of the site as default.
This might not be what we wanna do, and will need to discuss how we want everything to function - but I thought it best to have stuff not appear on the front page as default, and if you want it to, you select that from the Publishing options at the bottom. The reason I did this was there seems to be a lot of stuff we might want to load in to books, and images we might want to contribute at first and having everything pop up on the front page may become disorienting to new folks.
We might choose to set story to be default Publish to front page, and leave the others off. A user can always change that setting though for any particular content type (unless I change the access control settings I think). It should be possible to restrict what ends up on the front page entirely by requiring all that content to be 'moderated' first by someone (I think this is kind of what happens with the Yahoo site right now).
The front page of the site (which now has only a small sidebar on the
left with recent activity and some basic user controls) and a large
area on the right for 'stories'. The top story is a 'Welcome' feature
with a symbol. The stories that appear beneath it can come from
various sources: blogs are only one of these, though at the present
that is all that is happening. We could choose to not allow blog
posts to appear on the front page at all. This would leave the latest
minutes or events up there for a longer time. Any kind of post can be
promoted to 'the front page', though only one type appears there by
default (story) right now. This is all part of defining the
'Workflow' or how we will use the site.
One possible workflow: When minutes are posted, they could be posted
as a 'book page' or a 'story' which would then get linked into the
'outline' so that it appears in the correct 'chapter' of the Minutes
and Newsletters 'Book'. All books are in the 'library'. Click
library to see all the current books. The books are created, and get
bigger as more pages are added to them. The pages can be moved around
easily and re-organized as needed without having to do any kind of
hand coding. We can assign permissions to whoever needs to maintain
this kind of thing.
A 'book page' might have a short stint on the front page until it is
superseded by another (more recent) posting. Older posts then move
down (in reverse chrono order - much like your average blog).
In order to post the minutes on a website, the notes were composed in Word and saved in HTML format for many years, when the Clann began using the Yahoo groups list, it became common to post the minutes in the original Microsoft Word doc format. While using Word makes it easy to compose a readable document (if you own Word!), Word does *not* generate standard HTML, and HTML created from Word is not easy to get onto the web without massive intervention. (Caveat: you can throw a MS Word saved HTML doc right up on the web, and it will display OK, but since it's non-standard HTML, don't expect to be able to easily integrate it into a themed website like this one).
We might argue back and forth the relative merits of Word / Frontpage vs. Open source alternatives, but the bottom line is we need to create a document specification for minutes that is easy for anyone to comply with. The content of the minutes is fairly well understood - the disagreements we have had about that lately regarding required detail aside. The digital format of the minutes is not.
An alternative, just popping into my head now might be some kind of Word macro which cleans up the code, or possible a Word template which creates only the formatting we want. Forms are good. However, not everyone has Word at home believe it or not - so I'd like to stick with free software.
However the minutes are generated, they eventually need to be converted into standard HTML for inclusion on the website. In my opinion, the Sencha should type the minutes in something that will create standard HTML easily! From my experience, it's best if we define a small subset of HTML that can be used.
For instance, we might create a spec that defines the header as bold, the subsections as underlined, the attendance as a bulleted list, the What News as an ordered list, etc. Then we know what tags will always be used and could create a template or a form.
For me, it's easy to just write it out in HTML, since it's no more arcane than ogham or runes, in fact it's English so it's easier to understand. But, given the success that Aonghus had with that doctrine on the AOL site, I think we should settle on something WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get).
Google Docs should do this (though I haven't tried to import the minutes I typed up in that as yet), as well as Open Office (though I am sceptical if anyone will be willing to install that if they already have Microsoft Office). I think we might be able to standardize on N-vu which is available for Windows, Linux, MacOSX, as well as other operating systems, and is open source and free. (It's the old Netscape Composer after it was removed from Mozilla). I think it may be the way to go for anyone who wants to create better formatted HTML documents for inclusion on this (or any) website.
It is also possible to incorporate a WYSiWYG editor (called tinyMCE) into Drupal, but I doubt the Sencha will want to be forced into typing the stuff up while online.
It seems someone actually sells a product called
Word Cleaner that puports to do the job for you, but it's a shame we have to waste time doing it all.
It's a much more commonly discussed thing than I thought at first. Here's a good article about it on MonkeyFlash.