Over the past few months, the development team has been busy working on the backend of this site, trying to integrate its various tools into a single, seamless usability experience. Now that those efforts have begun to bear fruit, we can start to turn our attention to other pressing development needs.

One of the items that has been at the top of our to-do list for a long time now reads “Redesign the Home Page to take better advantage of feeds.” If you don’t know what an RSS feed is, check out RSS Feeds in plain English. Basically, RSS feeds are streams of data that an be incorporated into webpages so that those pages present constantly updated information. Examples of RSS feeds include the listing of “Recent blog posts” on our current home page and the “Site-Wide Activity” feed on the News page.

Right now, the top half of our home page is almost completely static. As we redesign it, we’ll want to use RSS feeds to showcase more of the activity going on across our site. One suggestion that came out of last Friday’s CUNY WordCampEd meetings is that the Commons can aggregate not only activity on the Commons, but also activity on other WordPress installs on various CUNY campuses. That would allow the Commons to be a true hub for the CUNY community.

We’re throwing around various ideas among ourselves, but this website is premised on the assumption that it will adapt to the needs and desires of its community. So: what would YOU like to see on the new homepage? What feeds should be there? What feeds do you want to see elsewhere (on pages other than the home page) on the site? How can the Commons best showcase the work, energy, and enthusiasm of its communities? Please let us know in the comments below.

Image by Kurtphoto