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Nicky Veitch

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:

  1. Ensure technical infrastructure is appropriate for now and future
  2. Relaunch the JCM
  3. Increase the number of volunteers in the JCM team
  4. Increase the number of authors
  5. Increase the amount and quality of contributions JCM receives
  6. Increase readership

For more information see planning document: 2019 JCM Relaunch
Goal 1, JCM platform upgrade plan: 2019 JCM Platform Upgrade

Agenda:

  1. Work completed since last meeting.
  2. Current status.
  3. Action items.


Goal 1: Ensure technical infrastructure is appropriate for now and future

Discussion:

A.  Work completed since last meeting:

  1. 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).
  2. 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.
  3. 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.
  4. Created required custom Field Groups and Fields in Users and Content.

B.  Current status:

  1. Everything done so far has been merged into master (2019-05-02).
  2. 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)
  3. 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.
  4. 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:

  1. Page layouts/overrides - in progress.
  2. Testing.
  3. Determine best time to migrate back to sandbox site - once page layouts are complete.
  4. Import user tables from live site.
  5. Configure ACL.
  6. Existing CComments - to be re-imported from live site.
  7. Redirects of K2 to core - existing aliases can be maintained so redirects should not be required.
  8. Identify missing authors and fix in MySQL.
  9. 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.
  10. Define roles (with future J4 Workflow in mind).
  11. 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.