Want to be part of the new Sydenham Town?

[admin]

People who have bumped into me lately may know it will be Sydenham Town's 10th and the Forum's 4th birthday in October.

And its time for a re-vamp. A fresh approach for the next 10 years?

I have started thinking of how we can move the website forward to be more interactive with the community. How it could help both community organisations and individuals. But it would be sad if it ended a one man show. Hence I would appreciate an informal group either individually or together to be part of both the governance and driving force for the future.

The bottom line is if I was run over by a bus - Sydenham Town would go on and probably improve!

So if you are committed to supporting a website independent of any interest and accessible to all. Or if you can write, take piccies or do anything to help - let me know in some way.

The first job will be putting a better site together for October. Or organising the Festivities!

Admin

[scott.l.hamilton]

I am in!!!

[leenewham]

You should already have my PM.

[Tim Lund]

Yes - I want to be involved too. Can we also make an effort to find at least one more reasonably techie person, who can tall TLAs like SQL, CSS, PHP, CMS etc.?

[bensonby]

I'm willing to help at anything in particular- though I doubt I have any useful skills.


I don't know how it would be achieved but perhaps greater awareness of this site and associated activities needs to be achieved. I only found this website after getting anry enough over "Ostergate" to start googling on t'internet.

There are thousands and thousands of people that live in SE26 - but how many are actually involved in anything, or even aware of Sydenham activities/this website?

[Annie]

Please don't change the look of it too much,i love the layout and colour blue

[Ronski]

I was speaking to a friend of mine on the week-end who is a project manager at a web company, very experienced.

He recommended using an open source package called Joomla for content management for community sites. It has many extensions & plugins to run everything from flickr content to classified ads. Looks pretty interesting here's the link...

http://www.joomla.org/

This might help free up the site to allow more people to create content. Oh I vote to keep the blue as well

[admin]

I have built one Sydenham site (http://barts.sydenham.org.uk) with the Drupal CMS but found it would not handle some of the embedded scripts which underpin parts of the site.

I have experimented with Joomla - and another party here is using it for the redevelopment of another Sydenham site. I'm letting him make the pace and see what he can bring to the party.

A consideration is the Forum. Taking it forward to phpbb V3 should be straightforward. I don't think any of the CMS forums quite measure up to it and if we could port the database into them - could we ever port it back? I hope future Sydenham historians would find the ramblings of early 21stC Sydenhamites interesting - so it is a resource I would like to preserve in an easily accessible form.

What you say about having a group who could individually contribute would be wonderful. So instead of the current website/forum split (bandaged with templates) we could move to a federal system. That is a Sydenham Portal which would link to the Forum, Sydenham TV, Blogs and CMS subsites which could be managed by different people.

The key IMHO is people not technology. If there is a group who want to manage and write a part of a Sydenham Town based network then we can build a CMS or Blog around them. Integrating the Flickr stuff would be great. I believe there is also a Facebook Sydenham network. Connecting all this stuff together rather than one site trying to be all things to all people is the future. Would you be up as curator for a Sydenham Gallery?

See you Tuesday!

Admin

[bensonby]

how about structuring some of the other info on the site - the directory &c. as a wiki? Then people could add/delete info as older stuff becomes out of date....

[admin]

This is part of the plan in conjunction with the SydSoc folks. Virtual Norwood already has a wiki and I'm good at stealing ideas! I'm planning to take a 100 yard stretch of Sydenham Road as a pilot. Watch this space.

Admin

[DaveT]

I have to agree with a comment earlier, technology aside (having built and used Joomla, Drupal, mediawiki, dokuwiki, phpbbv2/3 sites and more), my first question is "what are the requirements".

Thoughts:

1. a wiki - for Sydenham information - to allow community contribution to a collection of information on the past, present and future of Sydenham,

2. Forums - so popular and successful already

3. Community - which is how I see the main STC site as it stands now.

others? Let's collect requirements and I'm sure the techies can work out a solution later.

DaveT

ps - yep, I'm a techie, so that side of things is a piece of cake. It's the graphic and web-site design I'm afwul at

[Sydenham]

Can someone tell me what a CMS is? I only know it from IBM's mainframe VM/CMS operating system where it stood/stands for Conversational Monitor System.

Thanks.

[alanh]

Can someone tell me what a CMS is? I only know it from IBM's mainframe VM/CMS operating system where it stood/stands for Conversational Monitor System.

Thanks.

CMS = Content Management System

[admin]

My ideas about the new website are starting to crystalise. I envisage it having five main drivers:

* Forum
* News
* Event Diary
* Directory
* Gallery

They will all be headlined on the frontpage and, hopefully, they will crossfeed each other. So an event in the Diary can link to a Forum thread, an information page and a map.

I have replaced the old diary with an embedded Google Calendar which looks good for the job. You can see it here (with not much content): http://www.sydenham.org.uk/diary.html

What I desperately need is more dates so I can start playing with links. Please PM me any relevant SE26 events. Anyone wanna be a Diary Manager?

Admin

PS I'm swinging back to a light blue theme to match the calendar ...

[Steve Grindlay]

Oh, I like the Google calendar; I've added it to my own calendar as one of my homepages. Now I need never miss another event in Sydenham.

[admin]

The code for the page which anyone can embed on any HTML webpage is:

<IFRAME SRC="http://www.google.com/calendar/embed?sh ... e%2FLondon" STYLE=" border-width:0 " WIDTH="560" HEIGHT="500" FRAMEBORDER="0" SCROLLING="no"></IFRAME>

Obviously you can change the size and one or two of the other prameters.

Admin

[Ronski]

looks great, nicely done!

[bigbadwolf]

I have one suggestion. Would it be possible for our account profiles to be updated aswell. Nothing too drastic but along the lines of facebook where we can include things such as interests and a little bit about themselves and for the more adventarous amongst us a picture aswell. However, this must not be a requirement to qualify for an account as I fully understand that others enjoy their anonyminity . What do you guys think?

[Tim Lund]

And if anyone wants to see Stuart's lovely Google calendar in Agenda format, see SydSoc's tribute here:

http://www.sydenhamsociety.com/Events.html

Admin: is it okay for me to ask here for techie help with what I'm trying to do in Joomla with the SydSoc site?

[sean]

I'd like to see more videos contained within the story articles. And in time hopefully a new Radio section when the radio team get it up and running. There could also be a facility where readers can send in video if the are "on-the-scene" which can be added to any article. Maybe a new section where people can 'Ask your Councillor' - maybe a forum or chat room where a scheduled event can be held with the councillors; the chat room can close once this has finished. Maybe on the front page somewhere a live feed about trains arriving and leaving Sydenham. They have them here, maybe they can be transfered: http://www.livedepartureboards.co.uk/ld ... aspx?T=SYD

Maybe a desktop ticker that sits there and is updated with the latest Sydenham news and/or latest forum postings, here is something free: http://www.mioplanet.com/rsc/develop_ticker.htm