Blog Tags: 
drupal
website

TurnKey website refreshed

Liraz Siri - Thu, 2010/12/30 - 18:26 - 9 comments

I've just finished updating the TurnKey website with a range of improvements designed to smooth over existing rough spots and better accommodate the needs of the project as it expands with the upcoming release. 

Veteran community members using modern browsers may also notice the site looks just a bit more visually pleasing now. Otherwise I've just been obsessively tweaking the stylesheets for nothing.

Motivation

Part 2 of the release will more than double the number of solutions in the TurnKey appliance library. Up until now the main way to find appliances was to browse by category, but that can be unnecessarily cumbersome with large numbers of appliances and categories.

Unfortunately, the site search wasn't very good either, so for example if you searched for "LAMP", a forum post would often come up instead of the appliance you wanted.

Also, our most active community members complained that navigating the site involved too many clicks, and that the site forums may be lacking the organization required to make sense of the great mass of content within it.

Highlights

Search

  • Front page live appliance search (I had to write a custom Drupal module to do this!)
  • Added search filter to appliance categories
  • Revamped site search
    • replaced core search with Lucene API search
    • give preference to appliance and documentation content over forum posts.
    • allow refinement of search results by content type
    • cleaned up display of search results

Added forum tagging

  • Each post can have multiple free tags. Users and moderators will use this feature to better organize the forum contents.
  • Each tag can be viewed as a "virtual forum" (e.g., tklpatch tag)

That's it in a nutshell regarding this latest crop of changes. Those interested in more detail on how the site works behind the scenes, may want to read the Drupal showcase I published back in January. There have been incremental improvements since then but the basics haven't changed.

As usual, feedback is welcome. Especially if you come across any bugs. Got ideas for further improvements? Share them and it may just end up on my todo list. I'm not done with the website yet!