Infrastructure at the space

[Ben Orrin]

This is part of an ongoing part of the space's structure, but since we have been getting more members, projects, the possibility of moving into a building and the introduction of the RFID system after christmas, it may be a good idea to start thinking about the infrastructure we want to run at the space.

Currently most of our infrastructure is spread across the web, I want to rebuild the website from the ground up, implementing useful tools for members. The idea being that everything works with everything else. I thought it may be a good idea to bring in, or at least start talks about the structure of our networks, any policies, the website etc. as building on-top of our exististing infrastructure may cause a big mess to be cleared up in the future.

I will make a wiki page about this soon, any input would be brilliant.

[Will]

I think rather than writing a website through wordpress or its themes, we should think about designing our own platform for the site which is designed for projects and makerspaces in general. Make it more like a space where the page leaves lots of room for people to have their own ideas and projects on it. There is enough expertise in the group to do this and we just need to pick up a lightweight framework and it can show prospective members some of our achievement.

Useful things on the site could be:

• A proper project page rather than using a wiki/wordpress. Like listing a product almost where you describe tools, cost and linked pages. This could help organise us and make the site more useful.
• A microblogging feature for each project which shows progress rather than a static page. It dosn't have to be complicated, but just so its visible we are doing stuff.
• A pledging page which can come along the same time as membership cards where we can do a kickstarter style pay for it and see the progress of the pledge. Money would only change hands if the pledge was successful.

This couldn't be done overnight but it will provide the basis for a much better organised site. That went on for a bit to long but i kinda go into it.

[Ross]

Will's ideas are great.

I definitely think, as I've expressed multiple times, that we should have a single, or two, centralized sites where things can be easily accessed. One of these should be http://www.chelmsfordmakerspace.co.uk/ and maybe the Facebook page/Twitter. The main functionality should be available at http://www.chelmsfordmakerspace.co.uk/ and Facebook/Twitter should be PR. 

Pages should be pretty clean, not convoluted and we should ditch the Wiki for our own, again, as Will said. There have been too many problems with spam bots and it isn't really designed directly for a Makerspace. There are lots of things we don't need there and things we do need are missing.

This site can act as a message board, similar to groups (Which we should also ditch IMO, unless we can't create something better ourselves), to send e-mails like the mailing list does now, a blog for members to post information about projects on, a wiki type shabang for information regarding Makerspace policies, detailing parts required for projects or whatever, a member database, with personal and contact information for each, and it needs to be friendly enough and central enough that the majority of core members will be happy to use it.

[RichardR]

Yeah, we definably need to bring everything in to a single site, having the static "about us" stuff with a microblogging part that any member can upload things from long posts to single images of what they're working on.

Also of use would be a members page where we can manage the NFC cards, etc as well as an announcements panel that we can use to throw important information up such as "No meetings until X".

[Ross]

Soundsagood to me.

[RichardR]

I'm thinking here of going with a Jekyll site or something that can be put on, say, GitHub Pages (Tests for this at http://cms.labcoats.eu/).

Regular members can write up their own posts and submit pull requests to be added in while still keeping the static element.

That way anyone can write posts for the site while still keeping a small amount of moderation (we can add trusted people to a team in GitHub who can accept these requests and post their own things instantly).

We're not restricted to just that though, we can still have our member area for managing payments (Look at https://www.paymill.com/en-gb/ as a processor?), cards, etc on the current server as well as keeping the wiki if we find it's still required.

Just throwing ideas out and experimenting with things right now though.

[Benjamin Orrin]

It seems pretty cool, but I'd rather we did our own thing and hosted our
own content, rather than relying on GitHub.

I like the idea, but it kinda puts ourselves in the same position we are
in now, people have to make a GitHub account, work out how to use it and
its confusing for people. I think it would be easier to have us host the
site then members just login with their 'Makerspace ID'. That way
everything is on one site with one login.

Payment provider seems fine, I'll have to look into it a bit more and
its API etc.

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[RichardR]

Here's the issue I'm facing, we need to reduce the number of places we're in and we need to make things portable.

To be honest, I'm not too keen on having everything custom, I've seen what happens when communities try to do everything custom and you spend more time maintaining the site than you do making content.

For portability, GitHub is all git based of course and almost everything is done in plain text.

If GitHub were to ever disappear, we could grab all the repositories and host them ourselves using the same things they do or move them to another site.

Right now I have an account for the wiki, an account for GitHub where we host code and an account for the main site to publish things.

GitHub can have pages, wikis and code all in one.

We don't need to teach everyone git either as they provide a pretty nice application for git things as well as, for text changes, the ability to edit it on the web.

I'm still testing some things but once I'm done I should have a hybrid between our current site and the wiki because let's face it, the wiki /could/ replace the site.

With a generated static site that's available to edit via git, anyone has the ability to write content for the site in simple markdown using any text editor they want and submit it to be included on the site.

They can also submit changes to the site's design and layout to be considered.

Looking at the wiki right now, everything in there is either a member profile, information that should be on the main site, information that should be in the documentation repository or a project page.

When I'm done, every member will be able to contribute a plaintext file formatted in markdown through the git repository for the page they want to add or modify, for simple changes they can use GitHub's web editor or for more advanced things they can pull the repository, add the files and submit them to the site.

If each member wants their own section for a blog or something that doesn't require change approval, we can do that by adding a submodule to a repository on their account that Jekyll will drill down in to and fetch pages on generation.

I'm experimenting to see if we can pull posts from submodules and display them in one stream.

Again, the way this works, if GitHub ever disappears it'll be easy just to move the files and Jekyll to our own server.

I'll work on this over christmas, as usual, anyone is welcome to contribute or make suggestions, I've left the issues open at https://github.com/ChelmsfordMakerspace/chelmsfordmakerspace.github.com/issues.

[Ross]

Sounds good to me.

Is the Wiki going to be our own custom/hybrid or is it going to be based off of what we use now?

I think using external sites is okay as long as we keep things to a minimum. A hub or something where we can access all outside sites would be nice, and maybe a place to store extra IDs, I don't know.

I quite like Git, but it doesn't half take some working out, so if we're going to use that I'd rather make that one of our only external sites.

[RichardR]

Okay, so in just one afternoon I've almost exactly remade the site using the static generator over at http://cms.labcoats.eu/

Looking at the wiki, I might just integrate it in to the normal site, maybe submodule it to a repository where everyone has access to it without having changes be approved.

While git and markdown has a slight learning bump to get over, it's far easier to write for, manage and administrate.

Markdown is just as flexible too, if there's no Markdown tags for what you want, you could just throw plain HTML in there.

I've also just got the site syncing locally with the PirateBox so it can be served straight from there with no internet connection at all!

[Ross]

Very good work!