Early in 2011 some preliminary changes were made to the Soslug (Drupal) website, which aim to improve the layout, navigation and location of articles. Since these changes affect you, the viewers and contributors to the site, you are invited to comment and participate in this discussion, To judge the effects of changes go to the web design portion of the site which is being used as a test bed.

To make things more manageable, this forum has initially been divided into 3 sections, look and feel, menu s and views and search facilities (taxonomy). Please address you comments to one of these sections as appropriate

It is most unlikely any single strategy outlined below will cope with these diverse requirements, but together it can be made to work if we get the balance right,

• Currently many items of content do not appear in the menu structure, rather they are listed in a number of views, (by the date it was posted?). Each view shows the teaser portion of the content. The content may appear in several different views.
  While these views can remain, it is proposed to incorporate all (paged) content into the menu structure ; to present it in a more logical order.
• Up to now free tagging has been used. This is changing to a mix of multiple tags and free tagging. In other words contributors will have to select one, or more keywords from the existing taxonomy, but are still free to add their own keywords; to better characterise the content.
  Its currently not clear (to me at least) what the benefits are of organising the taxonomy into a hierarchy.
• Because free tagging has been used, the default vocabulary of category has been used, it may be advantageous to split this into a number of different vocabularies. These would roughly correspond to the top level menu items; on the basis that the different terms in (say) software and hardware, will not significantly overlap one another. This should also help with the design of views since queries can optionally be confined to specific vocabularies.
  It is recommended the taxonomy manager module be installed, to better facilitate the ongoing maintenance of the taxonomy terms
• Lastly to keep the website fresh, we probably need to develop some additional views, especially for the Front page, to help keep this the most lively and dynamic Linux site in the country,