New Website and Forum

General
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Hi everyone,

I’m a member of Pavilion. We’re a freelance cooperative that specializes in communities. For the past few months we’ve been working with @briannaljohns in setting up a new website and a new community forum for GOSH. Both sites will be updated in the coming week (around Monday, September 14, midnight EST) and this topic will serve as a brief summary of the changes. You can preview both before we update the live sites on the following staging sites:

Website: https://openhardware.science/stage/
Forum: https://forum-staging.openhardware.science/

Our primary goal with the new website was to better welcome and introduce GOSH to potential new members. The new home page and corresponding text were designed to better introduce GOSH to someone who was close to totally new to it. In particular we wanted to emphasize that GOSH is a tight knit community with impactful, ethical goals.

Our primary goal with the new community was to improve navigation (i.e. how easily can people with different levels of familiarity with GOSH find what they’re looking for). This was primarily achieved by the new left sidebar design, reorganizing categories, the matching header with the website, and the introductory banner.

Some notes:

  • A significant majority of GOSH members read the sites from desktop and not mobile. While the new website includes a mobile redesign, the forum more or less did not. We may also update the mobile design in the future but we focused on desktop this time around.

  • We’re happy to change what appears in the header if there are any major omissions or some better organizational scheme.

  • We’re happy to discuss more changes to the category structure on the forum given the layout changes.

  • We invite feedback on the text on the homepage of the website and the banner on the forum.

  • @briannaljohns and I will be working on changing some of the text on the non-homepage pages of the website in the coming weeks. We will also come to you all for feedback on those.

If you catch any bugs please do let us know and we’ll get them fixed ASAP, we should also be around to fix things relatively quickly after the site updates.

Please reply directly to this topic - I’ll be around and I’ll also post updates for when we make or don’t make particular changes.

5 Likes
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Just want to say thank you so much - I really like the improvements. I shared it over at forum.goatech.org, similar kind of structure and needs. I think this better represents the intent of the site as you are able to keep the top level categories permanently visible - you don’t get ‘lost’ in the categories.

3 Likes
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Hi @Eli,

Thanks again for all the great work on the forum and website :slight_smile:

Yesterday, @kaspar @hpy @dusjagr and I were taking a look at the event plugin on the forum staging site and had some issues using it. Is there a way that this feature could allow for people to subscribe to events on Google Calendar? Right now it just has the option for iCal. Would you also be able to share a quick explanation as to how to use the event plugin with the community?

Thanks!
Bri

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I have just noticed that the contents for the manifesto are numbered 0.x for each topic which looks a bit weird. Is it possible to just turn numbering off in the Page Contents?