RapidSMS website specification

[Colin Copeland]

Hi all,

Our next planned milestone is to revamp the RapidSMS website. As you probably noticed. rapidsms.org currently redirects to Read the Docs and is no longer online. We'd like to build a fresh website for the RapidSMS community catered to both developers and government/NGOs. In short, the plan for the new website includes:

• User contributed projects/case studies. We really want to highlight project deployments across the world.
• Listing of pluggable apps/backends found on PyPi. We hope that this will serve as the primary resource for organizing and discovering new RapidSMS packages.
• Browse profiles of developers. See the distribution of developers from around the world.

You can find the draft of the spec here:

https://github.com/rapidsms/rapidsms/wiki/RapidSMS-Website

Let me know what you think!

Colin

--
Colin Copeland, Managing Member
Caktus Consulting Group, LLC
http://www.caktusgroup.com

[Merrick Schaefer]

I think a key aspect of the new website should be clearly describing it as a framework.  The biggest problem of the old website was that it implied that things built with rapidSMS were things RapidSMS itself did.  

RapidSMS allows for the quick development of applications.

I think another problem with the old website was that it was hard to balance the two primary audiences: 1) devs 2) programs people .  The site does need to balance both needs.  for a programs person they want to know why choose RapidSMS, how do I use it, who do I hired to build stuff for me, etc  For a dev they want to know about the plugable backends.

Anyway, just a few thoughts.  last time we built the site it suffered from a lack of a team focusing on it.  This time it sounds like you guys will shepherd the project along!

Merrick

--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "RapidSMS Developers" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to rapidsms-dev...@googlegroups.com.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
 
 

--

Merrick Schaefer
USA: +1-206-484-9177
Nigeria: +234-813-022-8045
merri...@gmail.com
@unimps

[Colin Copeland]

On Tue, May 14, 2013 at 2:21 PM, Merrick Schaefer <merri...@gmail.com> wrote:

I think a key aspect of the new website should be clearly describing it as a framework.  The biggest problem of the old website was that it implied that things built with rapidSMS were things RapidSMS itself did. 

RapidSMS allows for the quick development of applications.

Yes, completely agree. The homepage will have a tagline.. something like "Your custom SMS development framework". Open to ideas. The About page will also include a comparison to other tools like DHIS2, OpenMRS, etc.

 

I think another problem with the old website was that it was hard to balance the two primary audiences: 1) devs 2) programs people .  The site does need to balance both needs.  for a programs person they want to know why choose RapidSMS, how do I use it, who do I hired to build stuff for me, etc  For a dev they want to know about the plugable backends.

Great feedback. I've added your programs criteria to the wiki.

Colin