New Mars Forums

James Burk

Executive Director

From: Seattle, WA

Registered: 2011-11-17

Posts: 155

Website

Improvements to core NEWMARS.COM website

Hi all,

I am working with some of the other volunteers on the Mars Society Web team to create a new front page for NewMars.com.  Its main goal is to make it VERY easy enter & participate in the forums system and ease registration for new users.  A secondary goal is to allow us to host articles, images, and other content there.  To that end, we are looking at building the front page in Wordpress or Drupal, which are both Content Management Systems (CMS).  What do you think about this plan, or how could we do it better?

One thing we might look into doing is showing the most active discussion threads and/or groups on the main page.  Let me know if you have any other ideas.

Thanks in advance,
-James

---

James L. Burk
Executive Director, The Mars Society
jburk@marssociety.org
+1 (206) 601-7143

Rxke

Member

From: Belgium

Registered: 2003-11-03

Posts: 3,669

Re: Improvements to core NEWMARS.COM website

Drupal is cool, but you must be committed. Spammers use backdoors, Drupal patches these, but it's not automatic (this might have changed, not sure)

making it easy to post, it's dangerous, you might implement a kind of filter so they can only use HTML or insert web links after a certain period of time, that way spammers can't get their fun....

louis

Member

From: UK

Registered: 2008-03-24

Posts: 7,208

Re: Improvements to core NEWMARS.COM website

Hi all,

I am working with some of the other volunteers on the Mars Society Web team to create a new front page for NewMars.com.  Its main goal is to make it VERY easy enter & participate in the forums system and ease registration for new users.  A secondary goal is to allow us to host articles, images, and other content there.  To that end, we are looking at building the front page in Wordpress or Drupal, which are both Content Management Systems (CMS).  What do you think about this plan, or how could we do it better?

One thing we might look into doing is showing the most active discussion threads and/or groups on the main page.  Let me know if you have any other ideas.

Thanks in advance,
-James

Sounds great. Something is not right with the site when there are so few posts following such an important landing! So a revamp should help.

In terms of the look of the front page well I think photos are important. Then I think you need a few hooks for the uninitiated: Mars transit, terraformation,  Mars - our close cousin (facts about Mars)...that sort of thing with some standing articles to click on (also illustrated), and then you need a prominent forum link.

You can see what I tried to do (unsuccessfully) here:

http://marstrack.blogspot.co.uk/p/fast- … ction.html

---

Let's Go to Mars...Google on: Fast Track to Mars blogspot.com