2012 Web Working Group Report

The main effort of the Portal Working Group was to produce a live, working, alpha version of the web portal. substantial discussions preceded the construction and continued through the set up/construction. In some sense the portal serves as the best "report" of the activities. However some notes follow:

Philosophy and Choices

• The main purpose of the effort is to create a web portal to all the existing content. However it was recognized that some important gaps in existing content might exist that the working group should try to add as well.
• Given the above, it is deemed important in the discussions and the implementation that a clear demarcation exists between the portal per se and content contributed by the working group.
• With regard to content there should be no real distinction between content provided by members of the working group and content provided by anyone around the world.
• Content can be hosted anywhere including the server being utilized by the portal (if someone outside the project requests help to host their content for example). However, any content hosted on the canSAS server should be on separate pages, whether produced by the working group or others.

Infrastructure set up

• The smallangle.org and smallangles.org domains were purchased and registered. Both point to the portal but only the singular will be advertized
• A google apps account was set up for the domain smallangle.org which manages the calendar and mailing groups (e.g. info@smallangle.org etc). The info address includes all the members of the working group present in Uppsala so that any can respond to queries.
• Drupal was chosen as the content management software to manage the site.
• Several modules were installed to meet our needs (several more will need to be installed before the site is ready for prime time, both in terms of viewing and in terms of long term maintenance)

Site Organization

• There are currently 10 portal pages. The intent is to keep this number to a minimum. These are organized as a landing page linked to 8 subpages plus an "about" page.
• The landing page is the top level page and should stay as clean as possible. it contains only links to the subpages and a scrolling news ticker (and perhaps some kind of graphic logo)
• The eight subpages, organized by topic area feed out to all the content available on the web.
• Some content pages provide by the group were constructed. These will eventually be given a different theme in order to separate them clearly from the actual portal pages
• common to all portal pages:
  • the banner area which includes a google translate button - users are encouraged to contribute better translations through the google "contribute better translation" option;
  • the contact "mail to" link is on the footer of every page.