Questions about site layout

[GabeIsman]

Sorry I'm sorta late to the game commenting on your PR, but I had a few questions/comments about the site layout.

• I think overall I'm a little confused by the purpose of the /find page. It seems that what is intended now is for this to be essentially a list of links to search pages. It seems more natural/useful to me to have it be simply a search page for all kinds of content, with options to limit the results to a particular kind of content (podcasts/reporters/tasks/etc.). That would also really simplify the site by essentially eliminating (or turning into specialized landing pages) /help, /learn, /listen. Each of those pages could explain their particular aspect and then have a search widget that defaults to, or only has access to, a particular kind of content.
• This hypothetical search widget could also exist on the homepage, lowering the number of clicks from landing on site to starting podcast (for example).
• Might be nice to include a map of stations and/or station locator on the /organizations page
• /listen could also be a place to surface playlists if search is more ubiquitous and hence de-emphasized.
• Similarly /help is probably just going to be a landing page for Midas.
• You mention a messaging functionality on the person page. Is that just an email address/twitter handle (I think it should be)? If not, where is the inbox, etc?
• I think /posts/:id should /blog/posts/:id or even just /blog/:id.
• Would be good to include the admin pages/endpoints as well. How does an organization post /learn post? How does a blogger? What about a podcast? How does a reporter update their profile?

This is a big site! That's a lot of pages! I will encourage us now, as well as often in the future, to think about what we could eliminate from the MVP. I think doing all of this well is a very daunting task.

[melodykramer]

I think messaging refers to email / Twitter.

[thequbit]

@GabeIsman my comments based on yours:

• I agree about the /find page ( these pages and their function were derived based on my understanding from conversations and documentation from @melodykramer ... which I don't think I was able to absorb in it's entirety ). There are a few main parts of the site:
  • organization
  • help
  • listen
  • people
• I agree that everything should be searchable. I personally don't like the "one stop shop for searching and the results are all interleaved with each other and filtering is a dark art" kind of search. If we make it clean and simple to use, I'm down to pull '/find' right into the front page ( Google Style: entry point is a search ).
• Agreed, something like this for stations: craigslist. This would be a 'whole US' view, and then a list of all stations by state below it.
• /listen I think was intended to be more along the lines of what @melodykramer had suggested with categorizing audio ( and/or playlists? ). This could be, again, just the search with a pre-defined filter of audio.
• Yup, for now /help will just be a landing page/redirect to Midas.
• I think actual messaging is outside the scope of what we're trying to do here. I would think it would be the normal phone/email/twitter/etc. kind of list-o-contacts.
• I typed the end points quickly, I'm not pinned down to any of the verbs used.
• I'm going to touch on the admin stuff in a separate ticket, as I think that will be dependant on the direction we go with the "division of tasks" for the site.

@GabeIsman oh come on, it's not that big :p ... Another ticket to come here in a few minutes ( need to write it ), where we can talk about architecture.

[GabeIsman]

OK cool. That all sounds good. Mostly just stuff to keep thinking about as we move forward. I think we can close this, as I don't think there are real specific action items. Unless you want me to PR the site map with a few of the agreed-upon comments?

[thequbit]

I'm all about tickets having actions associated with them, and max openness. PR against my repo, and once we've got it where we like it, I'll merge up-stream.

https://github.com/thequbit/mediapublic-server/blob/master/site-layout.md