Integration of Auroville's Websites
From Auroville Wiki
Contents |
Many Sites
Over the years many websites for Auroville have emerged each one dealing with various aspects of Auroville.
| Site | Audience | Type | Hosted |
| www.auroville.org | Public | static | US |
| www.auroville.com | Public | Dynamic | Germany |
| www.aurovilleradio.org | Public / Auroville | Dynamic | USA - Germany - Holland |
| www.aurovilletv.org | Public / Auroville | Dynamic | USA - Germany - Holland |
| wiki.auroville.org.in | Public / Auroville | Dynamic | Germany |
| Financial Service | Auroville | Dynamic | Auroville |
Now visitors to Auroville websites are to jump from one site to other to find different types of information. There are several issues resulting from this situation:
- Information is often duplicated in different sites, often with different levels of consistency and accuracy.
- Identity of Auroville is broken into various parts that are not well connected.
- Visitors get confused about where to go for what type of information and the nature of relationship between various sites.
- Maintenance of all the sites is becoming increasingly complex.
Two distinct issues to resolve:
- Common visual identity and continuity among major sites so that the user experience Auroville as a single entity and move among sites with clarity.
- Common backend for the sites having content that are closely related – for example .ORG, Wiki, and .ORG.IN so that they can provide consistent and up-to-date content and decentralized management through common Content Management System as back end.
Common Visual Identity & Continuity
This can be achieved by having a consistent Cross Site Links and by adopting a standard header pattern for all the websites. Concept is shown below.
What is shown above is only a concept and requires to be designed properly to match requirements of various sites.
Common Content Management System
Using a common Content Management System the maintenance of various sites with related or common content can be made simple. For example the contents of .ORG, .ORG.IN and Wiki are closely related and largely duplicated to address different audience mainly the Auroville community and the public.
Using a common CMS the data of all three sites can be generated and maintained but since the part of the data represented by .org site has a large number of users, it is better to copy this data dynamically and keep as a separate site so that the public traffic will not over load the Intranet (AVnet) server. At the same time by having common CMS we can ensure that the data is consistent, up-to-date and managed by various working groups. So the data flow will be from Intranet to the public site. The wiki component can be merged into the Intranet as the collaborative editing is open only to the community members and not to the public. The public may view wiki generated content as part of the public .org site.
Development work
The development work has to proceed in stages
- Information architecture, Mock up model, usability research and final interface design.
- Coding and testing based on open source CMS Drupal
- Data transfer from:
- AVnet (to be counted (above 15,000 documents)
- Wiki ( 162 dynamic pages in the db as of Oct 23rd 2008)
- .ORG (3150 static html pages as of Oct 23rd 2008)
Phase 1 of the work is to get all the data into one CMS, the above mentioned stages 3 stages.
Phase 2 is to replace the current .ORG site with a copy dynamically generated from the Intranet.
Radio and TV
Since both Radio and TV are server intensive, it is advisable to continue as it is now in a separate server, but a visual continuity and identity between the sites are to be established.
.COM, Financial Service and Email
Since all these three sites are security intensive and run on separate applications they aught to remain as independent sites on different servers, however visual continuity and identity are to be established among the related sites.
