Looking back over the patches for the last few years, it strikes me that despite lots of patches, mostly from jdporter, there has been lots of good fiddling around the edges. The biggest flaws in The Monastery remain. I believe these are turning people away from The Monastery.

I would like to propose what I think are three priorities that would be a step change for The Monastery without removing any of it's existing strengths:

  1. WISIWIG editor for posting along the lines suggested by cavac in WYSIWYG editor
  2. A revamp of the main menu navigation bar
  3. Address the issue of unencoded passwords

I am not suggesting someone else does the work to make these happen. They are all things that I have implemented on other sites multiple times. However, I don't have the knowledge of PM's codebase or sufficient access for some of these. So I would need help to make them happen.

We only have to look across to Everything2 to see how relatively small changes can have a big impact on user experience

Javascript

I'm going to preempt an objection...that 1 and 2 would require Javascript and not everyone has it enabled.

A few years I ran a test on one of my sites to see how many people have JS switched off. After over 700k visits, less than 0.2% has JS off. But, I accept that PM is mostly frequented by older developers (me included) who are more likely to switch off JS.

But whilst JS is needed to make WYSIWYG functionality, we can have a user setting to switch back to the existing raw-HTML editor and also do that switchback automagically if JS is not enabled on the user's browser.

None of this is new...but is there any mileage or appetite for addressing it now?

In reply to Priorities perhaps? by Bod

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