== Portal Support Plan == Once again taking a page from the Wikipedia playbook, we would like to support Portal pages to serve as focal points for various pathway curation/user communities. A Portal page is essentially a specialized Main Page that can provide links, organization and features specific to a community. In the end, the Portal is simply a single wiki page and all the links go to the common pool of content available to all WikiPathways users. === References === Definition: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Namespace#Portal http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Portal_namespace Wikipedia Implementation: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Portal/Instructions http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Portal/Instructions Examples: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Energy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:West_Bengal http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Literature == Our First Portal == The folks at Gramene (http://www.gramene.org/) contacted us about having their own WikiPathways. We responded with a Portal proposal. == Specific Goals == 1. To establish a Portal page, Portal:Gramene, to serve as a specialized Main Page for their plant pathway community 2. Provide easy admin controls over banner, colors and content 3. Provide functions such as featured pathway, site stats, and news that are specific to their content 4. Load their BioPAX-converted content (conversion back and forth will be a collaborative effort outside the scope of this RFC). Comment Thomas: How to load their BioPAX content, using Cytoscape maybe? Comment Alex: Interesting idea. I was thinking of having them build a converter, like our Reactome project. But I really like the idea of converting via Cytoscape. I will test a few and see what the result it like. == General Implementation Plan == In order to achieve the specific goals above and look to the future of having other portals, we should make a general implementation plan. This entails the development of templates, stylesheets and magic words that can be used by the admins of various portals. === Content === Clearly, all pathway content should go in the current Pathway namespace. I propose using categories to tag pathways that are associated to a portal. For example, there could be a 'Gramene' category and it would be up to the Gramene community to make sure it's content stayed appropriately tagged. These categories could then be use in Magic Words and browse/search functions to help provide portal-specific functionality. === Magic Words === Magic Words are a Mediawiki concept that basically function like macros. We employ magic words throughout WikiPathways already to generate statistics, links to pages via images, and featured pathways. I propose we generalize many of our current magic words (e.g., statistics and feature pathways) that take variables for category tags. The same magic word could then be used for multiple different portals, in addition to the Main Page for the whol site (e.g., all categories). We should adapt the following magic words in the following order: * PathwayOfTheDay (featured pathway) Comment Alex: all we have to do here is provide for alternative reference pages that list featured pathways per portal. This is potentially better than restricting to a category tag, though it does require more admin maintenance. Should there be an option to cycle through all content by category rather than based on a wiki page? Comment Thomas: I think that in the end, you only want to use the curated list, since you want to be sure that no crappy pathways will automatically be featured. We could try to stimulate people to update the list by giving a notification (or tag...yes, tags again, we really need them!) when their pathway is not on the featured list. * siteStats (provide pathway, gene and user counts) Comment Alex: this should just require a category to restrict what is counted. User counts, however, would be non- specific. Should this be extracted out as a separate stat in an independent magic word? Comment Thomas: I agree, make a seperate magic word for user statistics. Magic words that already work generically and specifically: * pathwayThumb (allow pathway image thumbnails to link to pathway page) * imageLink (allow any image to serve as a thumbnail link to any page) These will require documentation to allow admins to easily make use of them. A single page describing the technical usage of each would suffice. === Templates === Templates are also used quite a bit in WikiPathways to plugin in common chuncks of code into multiple pages. We should develop some portal templates to support basic page layout elements, such as header, content boxes, and footers. The Content boxes, for example, could include News feeds, Featured information, Statistics, General site descriptions, etc. There should be a template for each of these basic types. This would dramatically cut down on development per admin per portal and lend consistency to WikiPathways overall. I propose the following templates (see Wikipedia examples): * Header (title, banner, brief description) * Featured information (feature pathway, text area) * Stats (site stats) * News (read in from a wiki page?) === Admin Pages === There is a need for a small set of pages per portal that allow the admin to maintain the front page of the portal. These could have names like Portal:Gramene/ * Featured pathways list - the list of pathways they want to cycle through for their PathwayOfTheDay * News page - the list of news items to display on Portal Page. Abstracting out the content makes maintenance much easier. * Variables page - configurable variables to encode banner image, colors, perhaps even some text such as title and brief desc? === Organization === Portals = Portal: Templates = Template:Portal_ Admin pages = Portal:/ MagicWords = wpi/extensions/ Stylesheets = skins/portals/ Comment Thomas: Maybe we shouldn't put the portal stylesheets in our server, but on the server of the portal administrator. This would be more secure for us and less administrative work (no foreign user accounts, setting rights). MediaWiki might have an option to store different stylesheet pages in the wiki (like MediaWiki:Common.css). Comment Alex: I think we may be able to side-step the stylesheet issue. I agree that if we do need to support them, we should have them stored on their sites. However, with the template system I've been working on, we can provide admins with simply style control over their Portal pages without stylesheets. My feeling at this point is that this is a better route. It gives the Portals a consis- tent look and feel. And I think the drawback of not having complete sytle control is made up for by having it be so easy to build and maintain a portal. See Portal:Test on the test site for an example. Style is controlled by /box-title, /box-normal and Portal: Box-header. These may change in the near future. Comment Martijn: We can also make gramene.wikipathways.org direct you directly to the Gramene portal page.