Tech Forum

Our executive sponsors (Don Anderson and Craig Miller) are interested in making the site more useful. Don has mentioned that when we migrated the site from Plone to MediaWiki and lost all the links between the country/state pages and the record type pages, that rendered the place pages pretty useless. Now that we have portals up and running, we need to reconstitute those links. We also need a way to measure which ones are done and which need work. That's doubly true because our admins can create the shell for a portal page (inserting all the boxes), but then a content specialist for the place/topic in question must populate that shell with useful content and links. We need a way to know which one of these portals is maturing and which are basically empty shells.

Some metrics that might help are:

1. A Special Page which lists all portals whose sub-pages (boxes) have less than 10 links. (These are skeletal portal pages that need fleshing out.)
2. A Special Page listing and linking to all portals with 10 or more links. (These are more mature portals.)
3. A statistics page which lists how many of #1 and #2 the site has.

Is it possible to use a specifically designed poll on this forum to track the progress of the portal development?

Darris Williams wrote:Is it possible to use a specifically designed poll on this forum to track the progress of the portal development?

I would recommend a page like:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia: ... n_Progress

The Earl

This forum software has a "project" module that allows you to create tasks and have people assigned to those tasks. It allows others to comment on the work being done on the task. It may work for you. Let me know and we can investigate if it will meet your needs. I used it briefly in the past on a PHP project I had the community help with. Since then we have not used it but we definitely could setup a new project.

Tom

tomw wrote:This forum software has a "project" module that allows you to create tasks and have people assigned to those tasks. It allows others to comment on the work being done on the task. It may work for you. Let me know and we can investigate if it will meet your needs. I used it briefly in the past on a PHP project I had the community help with. Since then we have not used it but we definitely could setup a new project.

Tom, thanks so much for this heads-up! I love the idea of implementing a project tracker that's integrated with either this forum app or with our wiki app.

And for anyone who wants to know the featureset of the projects module, see http://www.vbulletin.com/features_project.php

I've also seen dotproject.com, it also allows for tracking of projects among a group of users, and can be accessed online, and is also password-protected. Might this also work?

We used VersionOne at my last job. It works really well for Agile Development practices. However, I think it can end up being a pretty expensive product.

JamesAnderson wrote:I've also seen dotproject.com, it also allows for tracking of projects among a group of users, and can be accessed online, and is also password-protected. Might this also work?

I've used dotproject.com on some previous projects. it is a nice package but if you need to assign permissions to different people or groups of people it becomes difficult.

Tom

Neat info.