jerrysarcastic 6:28 pm on October 8, 2015
Tags: wptv v3 ( 3 )

Building a better WordPress.tv – functional requirements

We’ve been talking as mods lately about our site, and how it feels a little out of date: http://wordpress.tv/

It’s an older theme now, built upon a site that is even older, and it’s in need of a ~~refresh~~ redesign. For 2016 one of our goal is to work on updating the site to be a better home for the great content we get every day from WordCamps and other WordPress events around the world. With that in mind we’re starting a series of posts here to set a plan in motion.

We’ll be talking design and implementation in upcoming posts, but for now I’d like your thoughts on WPTV as it is now, and how it could be better functionally as a site.

What would WordPress.tv function like in a perfect world? What is not so great about the site now that could work better? What cool thing should we be considering that no one has though of before?

Please, say it here in the comments so we can get the conversation started, and build a better WordPress.tv!

#wptv-v3

Oleg Belousov 6:48 pm on October 8, 2015

This is the big thing! For me the content structure (IA) needs a big review.

I also have some of my notes on ideas / improvements, some of them are “nice to have.” and discutible other i think are “must have.”

– Design a better Archive Page with filters and not just a chronological timeline.
– Add @WordPressTV Twitter icon / link to the website.
– Add a dedicated MeetupMeetup All local/regional gatherings that are officially a part of the WordPress world but are not WordCamps are organized through https://www.meetup.com/. A meetup is typically a chance for local WordPress users to get together and share new ideas and seek help from one another. Searching for ‘WordPress’ on meetup.com will help you find options in your area. section and not just WordPress Related Events.
– Improve Search. It’s the coreCore Core is the set of software required to run WordPress. The Core Development Team builds WordPress. function on a site with this amount of content, add more functionality and evidence on Search Results page.
– WordPress.tv Blog relaunch. Search for authors.
– List all Posts in an event without pagination. They are not so much to be paginated.
– Improve the “Get Involved” onboarding and documentation representation.
– Link to the related Slides to be more evident and discoverable. We receive comments from the speaker with the link to slides with them already there under the description, but almost invisible.
– Improve the preview image quality. Can we upload the “Featured ImageFeatured image A featured image is the main image used on your blog archive page and is pulled when the post or page is shared on social media. The image can be used to display in widget areas on your site or in a summary list of posts.” for the videos like on YouTube?
– Possibility to have “Favourites” page or create playlists for registered users.
– Add a method to collect user voices on new ideas and improvements of WPTV.
- Oleg Belousov 5:32 am on October 9, 2015
  
  Hey Ben & Michael 😉 your suggestions are all valid for me and useful.
  
  I think in general the site of WordCampWordCamp WordCamps are casual, locally-organized conferences covering everything related to WordPress. They're one of the places where the WordPress community comes together to teach one another what they’ve learned throughout the year and share the joy. Learn more. should share some data with WPTV.
  
  My other two ideas are:
  
  – Add more content to WordCamp categoryCategory The 'category' taxonomy lets you group posts / content together that share a common bond. Categories are pre-defined and broad ranging. template. More info on WordCamp, on organizers, description, link to WC dedicated website, Twitter contact etc…
  – As Michael also said about “Speaker Profile” – Design new Speaker’s template page with more information about, bio, contacts etc.
  
  Other idea, not completely ineret to this post, is to encourage WordCamp organizers to add back videos on the respective websites after they are ready on WPTV. I saw someone already doing this great work, but the mayor of them not.
  - Michael 8:12 pm on October 10, 2015
    
    There is a ticket to add WPTV activity to profiles.
    https://meta.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/987
    
    A nav link in the WordCampWordCamp WordCamps are casual, locally-organized conferences covering everything related to WordPress. They're one of the places where the WordPress community comes together to teach one another what they’ve learned throughout the year and share the joy. Learn more. themes to link to WPTV would be nice.
- Carrie Dils 10:55 pm on October 9, 2015
  
  +1 on the improved search capability. Currently there are words included in video descriptions that do not turn up in search results.
Michael 8:59 pm on October 8, 2015
- Speaker Profile
- Related Videos
- Ability to play 1080 video
- “Watch Later” button
- Audio only link
- Date of WC when video was shot
Ben Hansen (ubernaut) 11:28 pm on October 8, 2015

i think all the above things are great my 2 things would be:

#1 better uploader
#2 i think it would be neat to have a time line for each location so you could go into any particular city and see the time line of just that city.
Ulrich 10:45 pm on October 9, 2015

Responsive design
Mark Root-Wiley 10:56 pm on October 9, 2015

+1 for slide links.
jperlman 12:55 am on October 10, 2015

I use the RSS feedRSS Feed RSS is an acronym for Real Simple Syndication which is a type of web feed which allows users to access updates to online content in a standardized, computer-readable format. This is the feed. exclusively. I pull in the latest video posts into my reader and then watch them or not.

I think it would be great to see videos in terms of categoryCategory The 'category' taxonomy lets you group posts / content together that share a common bond. Categories are pre-defined and broad ranging. and tags. We go to WordCamps and stay in tracks, beginner, intermediate, developer, blogger, you don’t have that notion when they posted after the fact.

Also, there’s no easy way for me to come to the home page and look for site optimization videos and find all of them.

Leveraging tags and categories more for search make the site more useful.

For me to have an ability to add videos to a wish list would be nice and also when logged in of course, having an ability to see the videos we’ve already watched.
buzztone 6:28 am on October 10, 2015

Make “Browse by WordCampWordCamp WordCamps are casual, locally-organized conferences covering everything related to WordPress. They're one of the places where the WordPress community comes together to teach one another what they’ve learned throughout the year and share the joy. Learn more.” available on http://wordpress.tv/category/wordcamptv/.

Ideally for me this would be included below “Subtitles” and done within a year list as follows:

Browse by WordCamp

2014
. …
. …
2013
. …
. …
etc.
Ben Hansen (ubernaut) 1:49 am on October 13, 2015

FYI:

http://wptavern.com/what-do-you-want-to-see-in-a-wordpress-tv-redesign
Hugo Baeta 2:41 am on October 13, 2015

I’d love to get involved with the visual design. Would be great to think of this based on the WordPress Design Handbook guidelines, and potentially be the first site to be documented there!! Let me know how I can get involved and help out!!
- Ian Dunn 11:40 am on October 13, 2015
  
  +1 for using the design handbook.
  
  It’d also be great to get your input, since you’ve been looking at w.org as a whole and surfacing IA/UXUX UX is an acronym for User Experience - the way the user uses the UI. Think ‘what they are doing’ and less about how they do it./consistency/etc issues.
  - BrashRebel 12:27 pm on October 14, 2015
    
    @hugobaeta we would definitely welcome all of your input! We’re just getting started with this process so it is a perfect time to put your thoughts together and share your insight. We would be very excited to have you participate.
rcemory 4:49 am on October 13, 2015

Link to slides is a great idea but a lot of presenters show code that is not on the slides. Codepen links?
- Michael 4:50 pm on October 13, 2015
  
  Live demos are tough to see.
  
  If presenters who do live demos would screencast they presentation we could cut the screencast into the videos so it could be readable. The coding examples would not be lost this way.
dlgmedia 12:56 pm on October 13, 2015

I would love to see categories. Like Plugins, frameworks, Seo, PPC,etc and yes be able to organize by date.
- Michael 4:52 pm on October 13, 2015
  
  Playlists of categories or topics would be great.
Vayu Robins 1:07 pm on October 13, 2015

Hi.
1. Would it be possible to use Vimeo or Youtube instead? The video functionality there is much better than what is used now.
2. If possible, having the Presentation Slides embedded on the same page as the video would be great, because often I would like to view both at the same time. Often it can be hard to see what the presenter is showing at a talk, but if I could follow along in the Presentation Slides at the same time as I am watching the video, then that would help a lot.
Thanks
Vayu
- kstarcher 5:57 pm on October 13, 2015
  
  +1 to point 1 here. I find the wordpress.tv video player very buggy – sometimes you can jump around within a video as you’d expect, but sometimes it starts over at the beginning or hangs. It’s the main thing keeping me from exploring the videos in as much depth as I would otherwise.
Tom J Nowell 8:51 pm on October 13, 2015

The length of the video. Right now you have to trigger the player which starts downloading the video before you know how long a video is, not great when you’re on limited bandwidth and only have the chance to watch a single item, or if you’re deciding which video to watch
- Michael 10:15 pm on October 15, 2015
  
  The length of the video should show in the bottom left of the player – next to the audio icon and start button.
Greg Ichneumon Brown 7:46 pm on October 15, 2015
Assuming the site is still going to live on WP.com, there is a lot of functionality we can enable by building a VIP Elasticsearch index for it:
- Geotag all the posts: https://en.support.wordpress.com/geotagging/
  - Enables lookup based on the user’s current location to show videos from close by to them initially
  - Also could enable building a map that shows where different videos are from I think.
- Add faceting
- Related posts should already work on that site, I’m guessing it is off because they aren’t very good right now. With a custom index, the related posts queries could also be customized. With geo information added we could probably improve the relevancy, especially if we also use the date.
- With a custom index the search could be completely customized, you just need someone to implement it.
- We could also try running every video through some free video transcription and then adding that info to the post. Wouldn’t need to be a great transcript to still give some value to the related posts and search algorithms.
I can’t do the implementation, but can set up the Elasticsearch index, and consult with anyone who wants to work on improving the search/related posts queries.
- Michael 12:14 am on October 16, 2015
  
  This sounds wonderful. I would love to work on this but I don’t even understand what your Hovercard says.
  
  I will put this on SlackSlack Slack is a Collaborative Group Chat Platform https://slack.com/. The WordPress community has its own Slack Channel at https://make.wordpress.org/chat/. where others would do understand can see this post. Thanks for the post.
GaryManners 11:55 am on October 16, 2015

Echoing some of the other comments, yes better organiztion.
Many wordcamps are broken up into 3 tracks, user/poweruser/developer, it’d be nice if the videos reflected that. Categories?
Also, whenever I watch a video I always, always, always click down on the low quality feed. If I try to play any higher quality the video will always, always, always freeze up at some point.
Sorry I don’t have suggestions to fix this.
Andre 5:02 pm on October 16, 2015

I’d like to be able to access more videos via the feed. There are times more than 10 are uploaded in a short period of time, including less than a day, not giving enough time to get them all as podcasts. I suggest changing the feed to 100.

I’d also like to have an easy way on the website to see the latest videos, beyond the 8 on the front page. A link to a virtually never ending list of what’s available would be appreciated.
- Jerry Bates (jerrysarcastic) 5:01 pm on October 22, 2015
  
  Nice suggestion. I’ve set the feed to display 50 items. I’m not sure it’s a good idea to go up to100 for performance reasons, but having 50 items in the feed should at least capture the most recent activity for several days
  - Andre 7:45 pm on October 22, 2015
    
    Thank you.
Michael 5:09 pm on October 17, 2015

Copyright info with link to license – to encourage use of the videos
Make subtitling prominent and add a link to Amara for subtitling – maybe near the social links.
Alex Dimitrov 3:10 pm on October 28, 2015

I went and make homepage + single view concept of how i imagine the redesigning 🙂 Its very basic, but still it might give some ideas
http://imageshack.com/a/img908/3232/BAuXX7.jpg
http://imageshack.com/a/img910/554/r7DZiV.jpg
- Michael 10:39 pm on October 28, 2015
  
  Those are very, very nice. I like the second one the best.
  I put this in the #WPTV slackSlack Slack is a Collaborative Group Chat Platform https://slack.com/. The WordPress community has its own Slack Channel at https://make.wordpress.org/chat/. channel also.
  
  We have a chat on Thursdays at 17:00 UTC if you can make it.
  - Alex Dimitrov 11:24 am on October 29, 2015
    
    Just setted slackSlack Slack is a Collaborative Group Chat Platform https://slack.com/. The WordPress community has its own Slack Channel at https://make.wordpress.org/chat/., i hope i will be there ^^
- Hugo Baeta 4:46 pm on October 29, 2015
  
  Cool ideas there! Would be good to take a step back, before diving into visual design, and try to focus a bit first on the user experience and information architecture of the site. For visual design, I was hoping we could think a little bit more high-level and use patterns from the WordPress Design Handbook, but we’ll get to those in time 🙂 Looking forward to the chat today!
kevinwhoffman 7:46 am on November 6, 2015

I’d love to see playback speed controls similar to that of the YouTube player and many podcast players. It would be helpful to increase the playback speed up to 2x.
- Weston Ruter 5:59 pm on November 25, 2015
  
  @kevinwhoffman Here’s a hack you can use to implement this today:
  - kevinwhoffman 5:43 pm on December 17, 2015
    
    Thanks. I actually found a Chrome extension that works quite nicely with most HTML5 videos: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/video-speed-controller/nffaoalbilbmmfgbnbgppjihopabppdk?hl=en

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Building a better WordPress.tv – functional requirements