CivicApps Features and Requirements

Features:

• Collection of common Drupal modules with straightforward configurations to accommodate broad adoption
• Support for typing and separate iconography of Ideas, Applications (Apps), and Datasets
• Support for User submissions of Ideas, Apps, Comments, and Voting, including associations and cross referencing to existing Ideas, Apps, and/or Datasets
• Support for the notion of “Popularity” as applied to Ideas, Apps, and Dataset types; relative popularity for a given instance of content is determined by end user voting, number of comments, and date of last update
• Top Ideas, Top Apps display blocks of content submissions with the highest trending popularity (votes, comments, most recent last update)
• Most Recent Activity display block to reveal the latest submissions and/or comments to an existing content instance
• Most Recent Additions display block to reveal the latest content submissions for Ideas, Apps, and Datasets
• Featured Idea, Featured App display blocks to showcase specific content submissions (may also be used for some forms of advertising)
• Separate index nodes/pages for Ideas and Apps, supporting Most Recent Activity and Most Recent Addition Blocks to rollup and display latest content additions
• Open Data Portal: facilitating arbitrary categorizations of data; any number of separate Terms of Use per Data Provider; and, linking to their data for download
• Search Capability: search data by Category, search data by Agency (Data Provider), search data by Format, and Keywords; global search of site by Keywords
• Support for scrollable banner display of logos for Data Providers and/or Site Sponsors
• Support for OpenID allowing use and authentication via existing login credential to other OpenID sites, or existing social media accounts, including Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, Google, Yahoo, Blogger, LiveJournal and LinkedIn
• Support for "share this" of content via social media accounts (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn) and email
• Separate RSS feeds and automatic Twitter broadcasts for new Ideas, Apps, and Datasets
• Support for Comment Notification allowing users to be notified via email to subsequent posts/replies to content nodes and/or comment threads
• Support for user registration and authentication via account activation link in email
• Support for two-levels of user types: Registered User and Application Contributor; Registered User allows for voting and commenting on Ideas and Apps, Application Contributor allows for additional voting on Datasets

• Proposed: Concept of an Apps Store, a new primary node that serves as a hub for useful apps for the community to download; both FOSS and non-FOSS offerings
• Proposed: Individual dataset nodes reflecting last update timestamp
• Proposed: Allow voting on datasets for those who downloaded them; support a "silent" promotion to Apps Contributor status, which allows for voting on datasets. Presently, the only way to become an Application Contributor is to submit an App, which is relatively "late" in the user interaction cycle
• Proposed: Accommodate voting on datasets that are not yet available and/or may or may not yet exist
• Proposed: Change current site wide pagination such that the user's backspace action does not display the default page results, but the last page results displayed.

Requirements: The CivicApps.org codebase is a Drupal 6 / Pressflow application. It is currently hosted on a LAMP stack, however just about any *AMP stack should work just fine for development/hosting purposes.