Evangelism/MDNPlans/Requirements/Hacks

Why are we doing this?

Hacks has become a popular blog for the latest on web tech and demos, so it's time to improve the user experience and make all the content we have collected so far easier to discover.

How will we do it?

Right now Hacks is a simple WordPress blog with what looks like a K2 child theme that was tweaked with a custom background and matching colors.

We want to add a few new pages and modify the theme to integrate the new features and functionality. With some design love and WP hacking, we should be able to create a more complete site that is easier for us to maintain and our community to explore.

What exactly do we need done?

The easiest way to explain what we need is to walk through each of the pages and describe the content, layout, and functionality.

• Mockups
  • Initial Mockups (10/9)
    • Home and People page mockups + additional details by 10/12
  • Chris Howse's Mockups
    • v1: http://people.mozilla.org/~chowse/drop/mozhacks/v1/
    • v2: http://people.mozilla.org/~chowse/drop/mozhacks/v2/
    • staged: http://moz.howsehold.org/hacks/

• Pages
  • Home
    • header + site nav, search box, social media block, welcome message, recent blog posts, footer + links
  • Articles
    • browse by filters (category, tag, date), article list, demo preview, similar articles?, article thumbs up/down?
  • Demos
    • featured demos, browse by filters (category, tag, date), demo gallery, similar demos, call to action block?, demo thumbs up/down?
  • People [removed; author info added to article pages]
    • featured hacker, contributor gallery, team bios?, contact form?
  • About
    • hacks description, history of hacks, mdn promo, mdc promo, mofo promo?, contact form?

Questions from Alix (based on initial mockups)

• why is there the tags option in the demos but not in the articles?
  • I just tried 2 different approaches to see which works better. I think we'll need to have all 3 options everywhere: Date, Category, and Tags.
• what's in the people section?
  • I thought it would be good to put faces to the posts... so I'm thinking we can have a "team" page where everyone that has contributed to the Hacks blog can have a photo and short bio. It makes the content more personal and puts a human touch to Hacks.
• in the demo gallery, could we tag some to be featured? or would it be by date by default?
  • Yeah, I was thinking the same... we can either manually tag them to be featured at the top (top 4), with others below by date (default, newest first), but with filters.
• can we have MDC and @mozhacks promos on all the pages somewhere?
  • Yes, that will be part of my home page mockup and I will put the promo on the other pages as well. I think I'm going to make a MDN web toolbar/ribbon that sits at the very top. It will have links to MDC, Twitter, YouTube, etc.... My hope is that we can build on that ribbon and include it on all MDN related sites.
• in home or in about, could we have a place for a blurb that explains what hacks is?
  • Yup.. that is exactly what the About page will be for. We need to start thinking about all the keywords we want to use for the content and the meta tags. I also plan to add a section to the top of the Home page to explain what Hacks is briefly and link to a featured article and any other current promos we might have going on.
• Would be helpful to have the right keywords in there for SEO. Maybe about could also have an explanation of how to make the most of the hacks site
  • Definitely... if you want to start gathering info and maybe convince Sheppy, Asa, or someone to draft up some copy, that will be great!