OpenEuphoria community proposal
- Posted by ryanj Jan 28, 2015
- 2088 views
I was thinking about how the Open Euphoria website could be enhanced to improve communication among the users of Euphoria. I have a few specific ideas:
Articles
I feel that we need a way to officially publish information to the community as a strategy for encouraging involvement, sparking interest or ideas, and summarizing important developments. This would also make our home page much more interesting to potential new users. Also, images could be put in articles so the home page will have an eye-catching image that changes with each article.
Implementation
On the home page, make two columns: Current News and Articles. Articles would be a chronological list just like the News list, but it would have creole-syntax articles in it instead of news items. Certain users could be given admin access to update articles at least once a month. I would be willing to be in charge of maintaining articles. Some articles, i would write myself. Others could be taken from well-written wiki pages written by other users. Articles can cover different topics such as:
- showcase a specific library or application that has recently been updated, showing why it could be useful to the community, maybe even "email interview" the author to get info before writing the article
- highlight a specific feature of Euphoria and give some tips and examples of how to use it, to spark some interest and ideas
- explain development issues, bringing attention to things that need to be worked on, or summarize recent developments so people know important details of what is going on without sifting through dozens of forum threads
- success stories or research findings related to euphoria, or user experiences attempting to do things with euphoria such as using on specific platforms, comparisons with other languages, performance tests, etc.
- other technology developments that may be of interest to euphoria programmers
Image Gallery
It would be nice to have images in news, articles, forum posts, and wiki pages without relying on 3rd party websites that could change, causing broken image links. I think it is important to be able to show logos, screenshots, and diagrams at times.
Implementation
A page could be added to allow logged-in users to upload images to a gallery. Perhaps a link to the gallery could be added to the Misc Menu under Pastey. They could be moderated much like forum posts: put them in an "awaiting approval" list so an admin can make sure they are relevant and appropriate. Any image in the gallery could be referenced in creole text such as {{gallery:logo.jpg}}. If an image hasn't been approved yet, it would just show a placeholder image saying "image awaiting approval".
Projects
I believe that it is really important for the Euphoria community to have a centralized list of important projects in a consistent format. Yeah, we have the eu archive to upload files, and yeah, we can post stuff on the forum about projects, but i just think that's not good enough. We need to improve our marketing of what euphoria is actually being used for and what libraries are current and relevant without sifting through hundreds of entries. It would be very beneficial to have a system in place for project developers to post updates, screenshots, and important information about their euphoria projects. This would not replace the euphoria archive. The archive is great for archiving files, but we need a way to show everyone the important projects being worked on.
Implementation
A tab could be added between "forum" and "wiki" called "projects". It would show a table of libraries and applications that have been written in Euphoria. This list of projects could be searched and categorized and updated by any logged-in users. Each entry in the table could have the following fields:
- Project Title
- Project Type: library, application, other
- Rating: 0 to 5 stars or Thumbs up/Thumbs down or "Community Approved" status, indicating it is proven to be safe, reliable, to be taken seriously, etc.
- Author name
- Platforms compatible(windows, linux, bsd, etc.)
- Euphoria versions compatible (3.x, 4.x, 4.0.5, 4.1, 4.1 64 bit, etc.)
- Date updated
- Updated by (user name)
- Latest version
- Content (creole text used to explain the project and it's current status, links to wiki pages or forum posts related to the project, additional images related to the project, etc.)
- Filename (link to file uploaded to the rapideuphoria.com archive)
- Screenshot (link to image in gallery)
- Website (official website related to the project)
I believe these features would go a long way in providing a better website for the community. Not that we don't have a good website. But, it would a great improvement. I have some other ideas, but i'll just leave it at that for now. Thoughts? Let's discuss.
