CentralNotice/Future ideas

Below are some proposed upgrades for the CentralNotice extension.

Terminology

To reduce ambiguity and confusion, templates will now be called "banners" and notices will be called "campaigns" within the CentralNotice interface. This should make it more clear what is being referred to in each instance.

Add banner interface

The add banner interface (previously known as the "add template" interface), will receive several new features.

Banner types

The concept of banner types will now be built into the tool rather than relying on CSS and Javascript conventions. The two types will be "static/hidable" and "collapsable". Each type has two possible states. Static/hidable can either be shown or hidden. Collapsable can either be collapsed or expanded. If "static/hidable" is chosen, a single textarea is shown letting the user enter the HTML for the shown version of the banner. The hidden version is the same, just with display set to "none" in the wrapper div. If "collapsable" is chosen, two textareas are shown letting the user enter the HTML for the large and small versions of the banner. The expand and collapse buttons will then switch display between the two. All of the CSS and Javascript for the collapsing and hiding behaviors will be integrated into the tool rather than having to be coded into each banner individually. This should make banner creation much easier and avoid many of the styling/display problems encountered previously.

Display filtering

Setting a banner to display only to anonymous or logged in users is now accomplished through two checkboxes rather than special CSS conventions. Banners are displayed to everyone by default. To display only to anonymous users, uncheck "Display to logged in users"; To display only to logged in users, uncheck "Display to anonymous users".

Banner tags

To facilitate the selection of banners for a campaign, you will now be able to associate tags with banners and then search based on those tags. For example, all banners used for the 2010 fundraiser could be tagged "2010_fundraiser". All banners featuring a picture of Jimmy Wales could be tagged "jimbo". When creating a campaign, you can search for a particular tag and browse the associated banners instead of having to scroll through all the banners ever created.

Insertable globals (phase 1)

There will be links allowing easy insertion of standard collapse/expand, hide, help translate, and donate buttons. This will eliminate the need to copy and paste these components between banners. The HTML code for each component will be inserted at the current cursor position in the textarea. The code can then be customizable by the user. The Javascript for these components will be built into the extension, rather than residing in the user-supplied banner code.

In a future version, the list of insertable components will be replaced by a select list, the contents of which will be defined within a separate "Global Components" interface. This interface will allow the creation of reusable HTML components. It will also replace the current "shared" template hack.

Live preview

It would be good to have some way to preview a banner before you save it.

Open Questions

Do we allow for anonymous and logged in versions of the same banner?
Do we want to allow for specific language targeting rather then just language of project? As in, show this banner to any french-speaking wikimedian.

Future Dev Work

Our first development push will center around simplifying the input process for new banners. We are not excluding other upgrades as part of the first push but are instead prioritizing input and laying the groundwork for our next set of features.

We'll likely work on this and more next ..

Improving Admin interface
Tightly connecting statistics
Introducing GeoIP

For more detailed information on these phases see: