List of New Features
From BeVolunteer Wiki
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- Proposed Features
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- New features team
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Overview
Howto:
Discussion takes place in the bevolunteer and in the future maybe in the bewelcome forum.
- Suggestions that come up by feedback form or where discussion has not started yet should be filed as just ideas
- Features that are currently discussed should get an updated from time to time while discussion is ongoing and are filed as discussion ongoing
- Features that are clearly defined and discussed will be copied to flyspray and taken care of by the programmers. In the wiki they should be moved to the archive
Describing a proposed feature on this page
For a good description of a new feature, please try to keep a consistent layout as in the other requests below!
- If available, add links to related forum discussions and wiki pages.
- Please also explain the context of a proposed feature: Which pages or other parts of BeWelcome would be affected, in what kind of situations and by which users would this feature be used.
- The text box (preformatted text) can be used for a short description of the feature.
- Below that you can write some information about the interface (look and feel) and the implementation details.
Before the text grows too much, please consider starting a dedicated page for your feature request, or use the Sitemap, and leave only a short intro with link on this page!
discussion ongoing
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Signup process improvement
Read more... (wiki)
Context: Affects the Signup Page (BW-sitemap).
make signup process more efficient
PIM / Notes / Calendar
(PIM = "Personal information manager")
Calendar
needs a link!!
Calendar to organize/display/search meetings/events based on members/region/event type
This can be extended to display everything with a time/date information - for instance, personal notes can receive a time/date info, and thus be turned into a date reminder. Photos usually have a timestamp from when they were made. All of this can be used in the calendar..
Notes
A basic version of this is already implemented!
A note to manage personal information
Where is it displayed?
- only visible to yourself (the user) by default, unless you want to share it with someone.
- A list of related notes and last viewed notes can be displayed on every BW page you visit.
- you can create a new note on every page you visit!
What's in a note?
- short text
- can have time and location info
- can point to a profile, group, meeting, forum thread, message, whatever
- can be used to remember a contact
- can be tagged (using the same tags as for forum threads)
Planned trips
See Planned trips (table) in the forum.
needs a short description!
-
Common "sort by" function
(core - only interesting for devs)
needs link!
Context: Would affect action menu ? please explain!!
one central function/class that handles sorting of db results and generation of action links
look and feel
- all table column headers should be links that allow sorting up or down for this coulmn
- values that are not displayed but for which sorting should be available have to be displayed in a "sort by" box in the action links.
- Sorted results should be displayed with catagory seperator (with label) where it makes sense (sort by countries - display country name before first entry of this type).
Volunteer Tools in BW
Tools integrated into bw that are necessary to manage the site.
Already there:
- basic forum moderation tools
- translation tool (?), see Translation team
Planned:
- Volunteer toolbox, with volunteer-related commands, in the action menu on the left. This can be general volunteer links, or team-specific ones.
- Volunteer overview page with useful links
- A page for new volunteers to find out how to join.
- A personal volunteer page, with team-specific links.
- Overview of local volunteers for a specific location.
- "Welcome new members" tool for local volunteers, to write welcome messages.
New menues
just ideas
-
Find members - additional search criteria
- find members in selected area on map
- -> see Geo system
- If a member wants to travel to a specific skiing area there should be more than one villages that could be suitable. It would be handy to have a selection tool on the map (freehand or circle) to mark that area and search for members living in the selected area.
- At the moment there is only a radius, but a freehand selection would be good for example if cycling along a river etc..
- search option: "can call on arrival"
- additional user-defined search criteria
- -> have a blank field to add search options manually.
- find female members / search by gender
- ->to be discussed!
- pro: easier for women who only want to stay with women,
- contra: enhances dating spam
- Find members who moved to my area
Profile features
- Link: Past mail with
- Hide name PARTLY
Some members have asked for the possibility to hide their last name but have their first name visible.
- Hide Post Code
Explanation: In the UK every street has an individual postcode. A large road might have more than one. A postcode might only refer to, for example, 5 houses, so there is a security risk for members we should not deny...
- Second address in city list
At the moment those who have more than one place of residence have to decide which one they are listed with. Thus even if they spent half of the time in another place and could host there, they won't be visible in the country / city list of that place. We should have an option in MY Preferences to link the second address to the respective list. There should be an extra comment field where members can explain how often and when they can be contacted for that address.
- notification mail: Visitors of my Profile
A mail sent out with info about what members recently visited one's profile. Veit said it is already planned (?). The question is whether everybody wants that and if this info is worth a mail or should maybe combined with features like the Newsletter.
Communication
- mailman
an open source, no idea how practical and what we could do with it... (porter suggested it)
- Chat
[Forum Discussion] Implement a decent XMMP Plugin.
messages management
- feedback folder
members lose their feedback as soon as they submit, it would be nice for them to have it stored in a special folder or at least have it in 'messages sent'
- Folders
We should be able to create labels or folders for our messages
There should be also a folder for 'spam'
- Search in messages
'As a regional volunteer I send out a lot of welcome messages to new members of my area. I have soooo many messages in my "sent" box that I cannot look through all of them each time. Is there any possibility to find out if I have already sent a message to a specific member?' [copied from duesseldorf from the forum, Claudia]
- Icon: Replied to messages
We should have different icons for messages we have already replied to and for those we haven't
- example:
- unread messages : BOLD
- read messages : plain
- replied messages : a green "v"
- deleted messages (in a deleted folder : red "x")
- Quote original message in Reply
...Just as in most email-programmes...
- find members in selected area on map
-
Forum
- HTML should not be stripped (links etc.)
- ?????
- Search in forums (problem: server load??)
- Personalised Forum
With more and more forum posts and even Categories, we could implement the option for members to hide some categories they don't f ind relevant. This should be done in My Preferences.- Problem: This would introduce a non-obvious mode - Not a good idea!
- I disagree: this is not relevant for hiding some forum threads, they should, for example still be used for the search, and it could be made quite obvious that there are hidden forums, so that even after a year the user could find those hidden forums back. (like hide them behind a door icon etc.) claudiaab 14:29, 7 November 2007 (UTC)
- Experience with other hidden forums and posts have just got more distrust into the community.And splits the community. Questions like who in the hidden group? What are they hiding? Navin 06:15, 8 November 2007 (UTC)
- Complete misunderstanding here, Navin, the users themselves should be able to hide some threads (i.e. I would never check a hitchhiker forum, a South America forum would normally not be interesting for me etc...) It was just supposed to be a tool that would help users to create their own view of the forum, with the forum threads they regularly check, without having to scroll down innumerous pages... claudiaab 15:52, 8 November 2007 (UTC),
- Sorry about that claudia .I seem to have misinterpreted the quote categories with group. I agree hiding categories is a good feature this has been done on the lonely planetNavin 17:39, 8 November 2007 (UTC)
- I could be happy with something like "show these forums on forum start page". This would mean, the less interesting forums are not entirely hidden, but some more clicks away. I think something in this direction can already be achieved with subscriptions and group membership. The forum overview page would show only those categories which are considered most interesting for you - either because they belong to a group you are in, or because you have subscribed to a topic or a category (or a tag), because you have participated there, or because you are a frequent reader. In any case, the tools to select your favourite forum categories/groups/whatever should NOT be hidden somewhere in preferences, but integrated in the forum pages themselves. If that's what was intended, then I must have misunderstood. -- lemon-head 08:00, 9 November 2007 (UTC)
- Visit Counter!
To be discussed whether it should consist of counting post visits or thread visits and if one member visiting several times should be counted only once or each time.
Meetings
See Meeting/Party/Camp Calender "Brainstorming" in the forum!!
overview and search for meetings and events
As there is a big chaos in the forum about all the meetings, it would be good to have a special meeting site.
- Overview page for meetings
- Page with nearby meetings
- Find meetings (search criteria to be defined)
- Cooperation with cs/hc
- integrate with PIM / calendar features
- A meeting can be an object similar to a group - so it can have a list of members with different membership status (will come, not sure, can host..), and associated tools (subforums etc).
Geo system
See Geo system and Geography team!
- Overview
- when you go to the regions page and click on a region and you see more than 50 cities, it would be nice to have the main administrative centre(s) highlighted (in bold for example)
- there should be two buttons on top, which make it possible to see a list of the cities :
- alphabetically
- by number of members
Travelguides
- Link to Wikitravel of the respective city, and Wikivoyage for German (And possibly other languages in the future.)
- Possibly optional: Link to Hitchwiki.org and/or Wikipedia
- Links for local/regional/national public transport
- Price List for local services: We could add as a default text a price list that Local Volunteers can fill in to help travellers getting oriented about how much money they might need.
General
- Remember Password
- HTML should not be stripped (links etc.)
