Based largely on your feedback in the Suggestions Forum we plan to focus on the following improvements and bug fixes for Letterpress Commons. A more detailed list can be found in our IT Department’s bug tracking sheet.

All code is maintained as a service to the letterpress community by Boxcar Press. Any new features (as shown below) need to fit within Boxcar Press’s IT development schedule, and can sometimes take months of planning to come to life. If anyone is interested in participating in assisting with the PHP/JS coding of Letterpress Commons, please contact us! We would love additional help.

Schedule of improvements

April 2013

• Print/Trip improvements as shown
• Cleanup of press data and ability to add your own presses
• Recategorizing Print/Trip organizations as shown
• Allowing non-editors to use HTML in edits
• Styling improvements
• Gallery view of selected images within article

October 2013

• Resources organized and linked by press model between our Manuals, Print/Trip, and Museum.
• Twitter API integration
• Badges for other blogs
• Allowing user upload of images
• Make editing easier, front end editor?
• More content
• To be determined

Improvement overview

Better Print/Trip Interface

There are several glaring issues with the current state of Print/Trip:

• Needs a way to zoom to city/state/country etc. like the real Google Maps interface.
• Easy way to invite others to join the map.
• The map filters under options are not all that helpful, yet there are many more useful filters available. We’ll redesign the options area to include a bigger, better list of search filters.
• Code needs refactoring to solely use the Google Maps Javascript API v.3. Right now it’s slower than it should be because of reliance on other libraries.
• The map always zooms to the USA when it first loads. Instead, we will geolocate the request on the server so that we can instead zoom the map to the user’s country.
• Mobile styling of the map options/filters needs improvement.
• Optional table of placeholder information, which would show a table of addresses. Would be useful on pages where we use an inline map, for instance Book Arts Centers.

Better interface for adding presses to ones own account

Right now we have a dropdown list of presses that one can set to show in Print/Trip in your Account page. This list is not editable, so if someone has a new press there is no way to add it other than posting to the forum. We will add a way for presses to be added by the user. These would be moderated by an editor before becoming visible on Print/Trip.

Allowing media uploads for revisors

It would help revisors tremendously if non-editors could upload their own media. We are currently working on a way for this to work. The main obstacle right now is making sure this is well moderated. Who is monitoring uploads and how? Also, we want to move the images over to a CDN to better handle the volume.

Better organization types and capabilities

Leading up to our launch, it became apparent that our required “Organization” field was not working perfectly. For instance, the Organization “Hobbyist/Letterpress Studio” made the non-hobbyest letterpress studios feel insulted. This should not be used anywhere except in determining the map icon, so it’s not as big of a deal as people might have thought. Still, we probably need to break this group in two and contact everyone so that they can choose one or the other. The Organization “Fine Press Printing” also confused people, apparently, because it would seem there are some greeting card/stationery printers listed here when it was intended for letterpress book and broadside publishers.
For capabilities, it seems that “Wood Engraving” and possibly “Wood/Linoleum cutting” should have their own capabilities. We could perhaps organize a poll around gathering additional capabilities that we should track.

Resources organized and linked by model of equipment.

We need to do a better job linking together the equipment we list in our “Resources” is a new custom post type of “resource” that will organize books and documents initially. Resources can be added by users and searched and viewed by anyone. Resources will be organized by tags to help filter and display the entries. Individual resources can also be added to and cited within articles. Resources can link to uploaded media or to online resources for download, when available. Resources will encompass and link to the uploaded PDFs to our site. We will be able to better link documents to equipment shown in Manuals, Print/Trip, and Museum

Contributors