AirMozilla:v2 init

OK. I've decided that the best way to move forward with Air Mozilla is to break it up into two projects that don't depend on each other. One project is to make the Air Mozilla website work better and put in place a platform that lets us easily add improvements and build a stronger audience. The second project is to improve our streaming infrastructure and that shouldn't have any major impact on the Air Mozilla website which can absorb the improvements (like multi-bandwidth streams) easily.

Here's project 1, the Air Mozilla website overhaul. I hope that someone from WebDev can sign up to lead this from a development stand point. I'm happy to lead from an overall project standpoint, bringing in design resources, or any other requirements, but I need a technical champion badly.

The current Air Mozilla is basically a single "page" in Wordpress and it does not behave at all like a traditional blog. I think that a better solution would be to move to a more blog-like structure with "sub blogs" for the different project teams that want a home at Air Mozilla. Each sub blog would have it's own blog front page and style, and feature its own archive. Then the front page of Air Mozilla would be an edited aggregation of content from the sub blogs.

So, we'd have, for example, a "Marketing Live" blog with a sticky post at the top that displayed the current live event if a live event was happening or a rotation of some subset of archived events (maybe using a "featured" tag or similar.) This video, live or recorded, would auto-play when the page was loaded. Under the sticky post, there would be a "river of news," reverse chronological order blog thing that included posts for announcements of upcoming shows, posts for each of the archived shows, and posts for any other marketing video content. Videos in the river of news would not auto-play. Each post in the river of news would have a permalinked standalone location and from there viewers grab grab embed codes, access sharing with social media tools, have threaded comment discussions, etc.

Then we'd have a "Project Status" blog with the same kind of format. And we'd have a "Mozilla Brownbags" blog. Etc. etc.

Each of these sub blogs would be aggregated at the "front page" of Air Mozilla. The front page would have a big block at the top featuring the current live event from any sub blog if one was happening, or a rotation of content tagged by sub blogs as "featured" This content would auto-play. The top block might also contain a widget for selecting and playing (re-using that player) any of the "most viewed" or "most recent" videos. Under that we'd have a couple of blocks. One would have videos that the Air Mozilla admins wanted to feature, perhaps "the latest status update" or "the latest brownbag". These would not auto-play. The block next to that would be for announcements and have excerpts of the most recent few "upcoming shows" tagged posts from any of the sub blogs.

On the back end of the Air Mozilla website, we'll need to be able to create new "sub-blogs" as needed with their own owners/editors. Perhaps we can just duplicate the multi-blog set-up we have at blogs.mozilla.com. We'll also need to build some kind of "template" (not sure if that's the right word) that give authors/editors a super simple way to just provide URLs for the video and have the template provide all the necessary player and fallback code. (perhaps from here ) Finally it would be nice if we could have a video url "picker" that knew to look in the appropriate videos.mozilla.org/serv/ subdirectory so that it was easy to add those videos to the site.

What do you all think? How's this sound? I'll start putting together some basic page layout sketches next week and hopefully we can rope in our new Creative Collective community to help with refinement. Also, I'll be sending out my streaming infrastructure proposal soon.

- A