Mozilla QA has been working on rethinking what a new, better QMO would look like and how it will match with the re-organization of our QA organization. From our brain storming session, we concluded the following problems to fix for the new QMO:
- It was difficult to create content on the site
- There was no focus to each page
- Our community couldn’t easily communicate with each other
On an effort to fix these problems, we embarked on a 2 month endeavor to re-design and re-implement the site. What you see now at quality.mozilla.org is a direct result of that work. There’s many things we’ve accomplished, so take a look below for a quick run down of the new QMO. Otherwise, the easiest way to find out about our new features is to simply go to http://quality.mozilla.org and check it out for yourself!
WordPress CMS
Raymond Etornam suggested we move over to the site and tested the platform’s ability to work with our own content structure. We not only found a great match and a much simpler solution, but we found such a great set of plugins that really gave QMO the abilities that we had been longing from Drupal for quite some time. We added a welcome video and more dynamic sidebar elements such as Related Docs, category-biased blog posts and more.
New Teams
We now have a one-to-one mapping to each group within our QA organization. Originally, we listed teams as rolling projects which were hard to maintain, define and follow up with. Not so anymore, each team created on our page will have a lead associated to it who is in charge of maintaining that page and funneling through new community members. On top of that, our sidebar snippets are populated with categorized content from the rest of the site, so users don’t have to go anywhere else to find out what’s the latest in the team that they’re interested in reading about.
Simpler Docs Tree
Instead of showing a persistent docs tree to the right of each document. We cut out the third column and gave the documents some more room to breath and made the experience of traversing the chapters of each section easier.
A Planet QA
We created a feed reader from blogs (and tweets!) from a great group of contributors within Mozilla Corp and especially within our QA Community.