JCM Team Meeting 2 May 2019
By Nicky Veitch on 2019-05-03 04:44 in Community Magazine Team
Date: Tuesday 2 May 2019
Time: UTC 12:30
Attendees: Nicky Veitch, Jacques Rentzke, Peter Martin
Apologies: Elise Foltyn, Christiane Maier-Stadtherr
JCM Team Goals:
- Ensure technical infrastructure is appropriate for now and future
- Relaunch the JCM
- Increase the number of volunteers in the JCM team
- Increase the number of authors
- Increase the amount and quality of contributions JCM receives
- Increase readership
For more information see planning document: 2019 JCM Relaunch
Goal 1, JCM platform upgrade plan: 2019 JCM Platform Upgrade
Agenda:
- Work completed since last meeting.
- Current status.
- Action items.
Goal 1: Ensure technical infrastructure is appropriate for now and future
Discussion:
A. Work completed since last meeting:
- Attempt to create required page overrides using Alternative Template Overrides resulted in some issues where code was required in the /tmpl/ files, this is not ideal. The issue was around how to display Authors via existing com_users front-end model. Instead, PM has created a simple com_jcm front-end component which uses the J3.9 code style, and uses existing core tables only: #categories, #content and #__users. Now the MVC is better structured, and it is simple to change /tmpl/ views. While we appreciate this is a “custom” solution that needs to be tested with future Joomla upgrades, so too would Alternative Template Overrides (and 3rd party extensions). (The team maintains its goal of achieving a “core” solution which can be made available for others in the future).
- The existing site has been migrated/upgraded from J1.5 through to J3.9 with K2 and other 3rd-party extensions. As a result, the database and file structure are bloated with obsolete data. As part of this new work, we decided to build out a brand new site and re-import content and user data once the site is ready.
- In preparation for this, we have removed 17k spam accounts from live site which were auto-generated 2015-2016. All remaining accounts sorted into either a front-end or back-end existing group in preparation for ACL configuration.
- Created required custom Field Groups and Fields in Users and Content.
B. Current status:
- Everything done so far has been merged into master (2019-05-02).
- The following pages have been identified as required, and are in various stages of progress:
- Home
- Authors (all)
- Author (individual profile)
- Issues (all)
- Issues (year/month)
- Issue (current issue)
- Article (single Joomla article)
- FAQ (category blog)
- About / Become an Author / Subscribe / Contact (single articles)
- CM asked about excess code - ie. when copying over default blog.php. We could remove superfluous parameters for the community magazine. Agreed to remove and include required code only. Also remove excess parameters from jcm_blog.xml.
- Agreed that first “multi-author” JCM article in new JCM will be in first new issue, with team members describing the process of how the new JCM website was created.
C. Action items:
- Page layouts/overrides - in progress.
- Testing.
- Determine best time to migrate back to sandbox site - once page layouts are complete.
- Import user tables from live site.
- Configure ACL.
- Existing CComments - to be re-imported from live site.
- Redirects of K2 to core - existing aliases can be maintained so redirects should not be required.
- Identify missing authors and fix in MySQL.
- Tags - currently 71 K2 Tags, used for multiple purposes. Migrate existing K2 tags used for # keywords/topics, ie. #GDPR, Tutorial, Community, etc. Work out how to assign them to new core Articles.
- Define roles (with future J4 Workflow in mind).
- Prepare “Welcome to the new JCM” multi-author article describing the process of new JCM website redevelopment.
Next meeting tbc.
Meeting ends after 90 minutes.