Tweaking Cyn.in’s Features

Cyn.in is a great platform for collaboration but I am looking into how it might be adapted to be a better fit for the University of York’s needs.  What I need to do is work out which features …

• should be rolled into the development of Cyn.in. A good example of this is the UI for the Home Page when we have more than 40 spaces. It’s already apparent that you need a very different user interface for working with 4,000 people as opposed to 40. It would be good if Cyn.in “adapted” based on usage so that as the site gets bigger and more complex, the UI reflects this. One very easy (and cool) addition might be an “I’m going” button on events.
  
• already exist and are are about integration. Good examples of this are the FeedMixer product for displaying RSS feeds and the Faculty / Staff Directory product which lets people add more information about themselves in their profiles. the Anz.Jabber instant messaging product has caught my eye too.
  
• can be easily developed myself (or with a little help from my friends). I am currently looking to maybe use Archetypes to create a Location content type. There are others out there such as PloneWorldKit (uses Flash) and GeoLocation (uses GoogleMaps?) but I’d quite like one that worked with OpenStreetMaps and has less strict GEO-focussed functionality.

Other features such as “can I have a taxonomy of jargon-related abbreviations and acroynms that get appended or search-and-replaced when editing a document”… seem hard to define and even harder to work out if they are a low-level feature request to Cyn.in or something I could easily create myself. This isn’t essential, but it would be nice and could be made to work for peoples’ name, locations (such as room numbers) etc.

Another feature I find hard to explain is to do with how groups (and Spaces) are administered. I would quite like to create a Group/Space that automatically has a “private sub-space” … but that this isn’t set to be the default (otherwise people tend to work away in privacy and obscurity). I’d then like a “knock to join this group” button which the administrator manages. The alternative to this is a massive top-down administration overhead that I just don’t think will work.

One feature I would definitely like is the “First Use Ten Second Tutorial”… so that having accepted an invitation to a Cyn.in community you are presented with a one-page (maybe two) tutorial saying “this button does this… and don’t swear please (or similar)”…

Lastly, as I said, I don’t think the design of Cyn.in’s Home Page works very well for larger organisations and yet vanilla Plone does have a “Dashboard” screen. I like the notion of a personal dashboard where you can decide which portlets to show (or have them pre-configured for you). This, in one fell swoop solves the problem of “Fire Hosing”… it opens up the possibility of adding Google Gadgets (say for email or calendars)…

So in a nutshell… I need to…

• Attempt creating a new Archetype based object type (this may  be useful as a Minutes object for recording meetings).
• Add Location abilities (collective geo looks good but I can’t contact them)… this just needs to be very simple
• RSS Feedmixer and portlet
• Anz.Jabber for instant messaging (even if just for status … i.e “is online”)
• I tried at the WebServices product but get an error when I call it. This might be handy for hacking and integration (not essential).
• integrate Faculty / Staff Directory (does it do Twitter accounts and Blog URLs? If not needs adding)

And finally I need to work up and discuss with Cynapse some UI ideas, particularly with regards to the Home screen.