Features Development

As requested by the usability group and several users, we now have added the capability of receiving e-mail notifications with updates from the website.

It consists of 2 new features:

• Subscription: You will now see new subscribe to links at the bottom of each content. Click on them to receive e-mail notification of when it's changed, updated or commented. You will also find a My Subscriptions link under the advanced features menu that allows you to subscribe to entire categories or sections of the website and be notified when new content is posted there. It also allows you to review and cancael your subscriptions.

Following up on Saori's comments on our last meeting about how flicker presents a list of the most popular keywords and sizes them according to popularity, I have enabled a similar feature here:

http://fellows.rdvp.org/tags

As requested by some users and the usability group, I have enabled an enhanced directory with current fellows contact information.

This directory is only visible to fellows.

Please make sure you add the relevant information to your user profile so that it's listed there.

You will now see a Check spelling option under the text areas where you enter the content for your blog, forum and events content.

This is a nice spell check tool based on AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML).

I would like a mechanism to send mini requests/questions to fellows that is by default private to a group and that has a short expiration. I think of it as a hybrid between IM, forum and mailing list. I think Drupal has it already:

Please express your preferences about posts being profiled on the front page of RDVP.org. Click here for More information on this issue...

Currently, every public blog post appears on the rdvp.org frontpage. Does that make sense?

I've been talking to some people about this and wanted to get others' feedback on the idea that you would like your posts to become public (that is, other people should be able to view them without logging in) but that you would not necessarily want them to show up on the RDVP public homepage. My specific example is detailed project progress that our guidelines had suggested we leave off the frontpage. There are pros and cons to adding an option such as this and I list some below. I hope people have opinions about this and that we can work out a decision using this forum (as Vi has recently asked us to do).

Several of our projects aim to become sustainable by offering some sort of service or product on-line and charging for it.

I thought it would be a good idea to enable a couple of e-commerce applications, on-line stores and shopping carts for the fellows to play around with them and explore their configuration and how they could be used easily for their projects.

A short paragraph indicating how to subscribe to groups has been added to the Groups listing page.

Also, a small introduction to groups is displayed in the Group creation page.