Tech & Internet Forums : Mowia Developer News

Mowia Roadmap

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The Mowia project has been in development for four years, and over that time a lot of ideas have come and gone. Some ideas have been tweaked to make the site better, and others have been dropped because they did not fit in with long-term plans for the site. Here's a quick look at what you can expect on Mowia in the coming months:

Communities

Our community update will let users establish micro-groups within the Mowia network. Group administrators will be able to pick and choose what parts of the Mowia site they want in their community. You will be able to select any content on the Mowia site manually, or you can setup automatic feeds of module content right to your group's homepage. Each community's forums can also be tied directly into Mowia's, or you can create mini forums that are separate from the Mowia site. More information will be released in the coming weeks.

Politics & Law

The second category to launch will be Politics & Law. Specific modules have not been determined; however, the focus of the category will be to force structured debate between users. Online political discussions are notorious for getting out of hand relatively quickly, and we've come up with a few solutions to make the debates more civil.

myMowia Updates

While version one of myMowia is a very complete system, we will be adding a few enhancements that will make the service more valuable to the user, such as giving the user the ability to rename and group forum bookmarks, subscriptions, etc.

Speed, Optimizations, Accessibility, and Standards Compliance

While the infrastructure that supports the Mowia system is very efficient and designed to be scalable, the visual frontend portion of the site hasn't fully been optimized due to excessive changes during the development process. We plan to fully optimize all parts of the site, and in doing so we will also make the site more accessible to those with medical conditions. We will also convert the site to true XHTML compliance for maximum cross-browser support.

Some of these changes will be rolled out in phases, and others, such as the launch of Communities or the Politics & Law categories, will be rolled out as a complete system. As with anything new, there are bound to be bugs, so if you find an error, please submit a bug report on the forums under the .Mowia Developer. Bug Report section.

Chris, some things that you might want to consider for users are features such as Reputation (letting users give each other positive/negative comments which add to their reputation) and a way to mark threads as completed/solved. Both of these ideas are in use on other forums, it gets people posting more, and people seem to like them. I'm not sure if those fit in with mowia, but just a thought.

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