Plans and specifications

Coulee Region ONLINE is a dual purpose community site for the greater La Crosse area. The two halves of the site are "Connect" and "Explore". "Connect" is for residents to connect with other residents. This section contains forums, blogs, special interest groups, user profiles, and live chat. "Explore" is where residents and visitors can learn about the area. This split personality will be carried through the site's theme with the "Connect" pages being green and the "Explore" pages being blue.

Front page

The front page will introduce the site and have prominent links to both the Connect and Explore halves. In addition, it will invite people to join the site and show them what can be found there using views and nodequeue to display featured items from the site.

Landing pages

There will be a landing page for Connect and a landing page for Explore that will show highlights and direct people to the sections. Each half is further broken down into sections. Each of these sections will have a landing page that will aggregate and showcase the content in that section as well as invite people to add their own content. The landing pages are as follows:

Connect

• Forums: Discussion forums are the heart of this section and where the bulk of conversation will take place. The landing page will show the newest posts as well as the most active in addition to the normal list of forums and the forum statistics.
• Groups: Special interest groups are where folks with common interests can gather in smaller groups. The landing page will show the available groups, some selected posts from the public ones, and short instructions on creating a new group.
• Local voices: Blogs and micro blogs. This landing page will show exerpts from blogs hosted on the site as well as those pulled in from feeds. There will also be an aggregation of local Twitter feeds, probably using Yahoo Pipes as well as a text area for folks to add to a microblog right there on the page.
• Neighbor profiles: Each registered user will have their own profile page to share themselves with friends or the community. This landing page will show the top currently active neighbors, new neighbors, and selected neighbors from the middle. It will also have another invitation to join the site and a search function for finding friends.

Note: Need to decide where the live chat will fit into this.

Explore

• Communities: This landing page will list all the communities covered by the site with a link to their pages. It will also have a large map of the area, either a Google map or static. Possibly include a photo with each community link and the number of nodes associated with that community.
• Area directory: This page will offer browsing and searching of all the listings in the area directory. Commonly searched types such as restaurants will be separated out for quick linking. It will also have a set of icons for each type of listing that links to the add form for that listing.
• Calendar: This page will contain the calendar as well as a list of upcoming events. These will be filterable to help you quickly find the events you are interested in. There will also be a form to quickly add your own event.
• Photo gallery: This page will show all the photos that are tagged for a local community as well as featured photos. There will also be an invitation to add your own photo(s).

Note: Need to decide how to fit articles in here.

Individual pages

• Forums: Normal forum threads
• Groups: Home pages will use OG Panels to be customizable. Individual content pages will be normal node pages.
• Local voices: Each site hosted blog will have its own page which is a panel as well as each blog entry being a normal node page.
• Neighbor profiles: The profile pages will use APK.
• Communities: Each community will have a panels based page and be customizable with OG Panels. These pages will aggregate information specific to that community and figure a large map linked with the displayed content.
• Area directory: Each listing in the directory will have a specially themed node page with information about the listing as well as photos and reviews and a map.
• Calendar: Some events will have master "event pages". These are things such as festivals that are recurring and have information that is constant from event to event. Individual events will have normal node pages, themed specially for displaying event information.
• Photo gallery: There will be individual pages for each gallery as well as a page for every image showing location information and allowing commenting.