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Whew! Major site upgrade complete.

andrewstillman's picture
Submitted by andrewstillman on Wed, 10/24/2007 - 9:37am.

Dear Open Planner members,

Our volunteer, teacher-run organization continues to work hard to provide k-12 educators a free, cutting edge collaborative authoring environment.

I am happy to announce that, based the feedback of our users and our advisory board members, we have made some major structural changes to www.OpenPlanner.org. Though the site still has the same elegant look, lots has changed. Please come check it out! http://www.openplanner.org

Here's what we've done:

  • Added a user-friendly PayPal donations page where folks can make online, tax-exempt contributions to help us cover hosting costs. Please contribute at http://www.openplanner.org/donate
  • Cleaned up the content "tagging" system to provide a more streamlined set of subject area terms, making it easier to label and find content.
  • Re-engineerred the user profile structure to allow users to see customized sidebar links to content and link to other users who share their interests.
  • Installed a five-star voting system to allow users to more easily participate in rating content.
  • Enabled Google mapping tools to create a world map showing where all of our users are from. This is based on the city and country information only. (don't worry, we don't even have your street addresses!)
  • Eliminated the "Circle of Colleagues" and replaced it with "My Network," which is just a facebook of all users in your teams.
  • Streamlined the process of starting a new team so it automatically generates your first book page. All book pages you create are then automatically underneath the first one that was created for you.
  • Improved the "Planning Template" content type so that it is a one click process, and it automatically places your templated page it in the correct team and book.
  • Upgraded the underlying site software from Drupal 4.7 to Drupal 5.2, enhancing site security and performance.

Many thanks are owed to Open Planner Vice President and coder-extraorinaire, David Wees, who worked in chatroom with me for long hours from Bankok, Thailand, as we rebuilt the site from scratch.

Weirdness you might notice.

  • Your "Curriculum overview page" is now a blank page. During the upgrade, all old teams were given a new, top level page. Your old overview is now the page directly under this page. I plan on copying and pasting the overviews into the new pages, when I get the chance.
  • You are now prompted for your lattitude and longitude inside the user profile editing page. Just click your general location on the Google map and it will fill these in for you. Providing this information allows us to display this really cool map of our user base.
  • Your subject area may no longer appear on the user editing page. We condensed some subject areas to streamline. For example, history, politics, civics, and government are now underneath social studies.
  • You've got lots of people you don't know in your network. That's because you belong to the same teams as these people. Drop them a note and start contributing to the team together!
  • Links in update emails you recieved during the past two weeks do not link back to the correct pages on the site. We know about this, and there's nothing we can do about it. Instead of using the email links, just go to your team home page and look for the correct page.
  • We worked carefully to ensure that all user-created content was preserved during the transition, however it is still possible we made some mistakes. Please let us know if something doesn't seem as it should as we have all the content from the old site archived.

Thanks for your continued interest and participation in the internet's most reflective and collaborative online planning community. (if also among the only?)

Please continue to help us grow, and (now the hard part) to make the necessary moves to sustain the collaborative process in the OP teams you belong to.

Cheers,

Andrew Stillman

President,

Open Educator, Inc. 501(c)3