Website development roadmap

We have lots of plans for the website! We will implement these changes as time and resources allow. In the meantime, we are simply keeping track of what's on our radar here. Remember that this is an open source website, with all code hosted on Github, so if you happen to be able to help write code, please reach out.

High-priority items

• Implementation of garden-size dependent scoring. Currently the website gives the same species diversity and species composition scores independently of the size of the garden. However, these figures were based on a 1,000 m2 garden and we should implement certain scaling factors (not necessarily linear but something more nuanced) and score gardens depending on their exact size. Size should be obtained after the users add the polygons for their gardens.
• Bill of (plant) materials. We have a framework draft in place where we relate densities to species/groups of species, which will allow us to calculate how many plants are needed to fill a garden. We need to figure out a way to calculate the total number of plants based on garden size, current coverage, number of species selected, and associated density numbers. This can allow the user to draft an automatic costing report based on nursery availability and prices. Very useful for large projects and the landscape architects managing this.
• Show a photo gallery for each public garden
• Load a shapefile of the Egoli Granite Grassland vegetation type and include in the corridor page/section.
• Add information about possibilities to get certification from a botanist for a garden. The gardener should leave with tips on how to improve their garden from a design and ecological perspective.

Medium-priority items

• Roadmap items managed in the control panel. Instead of this being a text-based list, let's manage them in the control panel as database entries, allowing us to more easily keep track, manage what is done, and create reports afterwards.
• Improve navigational hints in the Garden Planner to ensure that people that have selected plants are aware that they should continue and activate their garden through the site.
• Remind users to create an account when managing a garden. You can create and manage a garden without registering, but it's important to make clear that unless people create an account, they don't have a permanent link to the work they are doing.
• Merging of colors. We actually have quite a few more colors than those that are listed on the search page, but many are very similar (different sources used different names, such as PINK or MAUVE or SOFT PINK for roughly the same color. Let's either merge them or even better have users see various colors when they click a "base color" (e.g. all pink variants if they search for pink).
• Include the invasive species list and create a way for people to mark which invasives are present in their garden.
• Improved cookie clearing when swapping gardens. There are cookies set to save the name/status/ID of the garden being managed, but when swapping gardens in a few places this is not being reset. Let's sort that out.
• Replace quill editor for a better one. The control panel uses quilll and it's a very difficult editor with lots of problems.
• Review / improve og: tags and other tags that help our social media previews.
• Add NEXT PAGE links to the ABOUT section so people are easily taken to the next page in the list at the end of each page.
• Allow for uploads of species photos separate from the iNaturalist photos
• Gather data on plant size. Would be very useful for gardeners to see this in the overview, but we need to get high-quality, consistent data, and we also need to build in traceability like we have with other data points. Once we have identified a good source, let's build this.
• Allow users to upload design files for their gardens to show the specific ideas are for their plot.
• Show a calendar for when plants were planted (which can be tracked quite easily when people change a plant from their FUTURE list to their CURRENT list)

Low-priority items

• Improve the date management of photos (allow people to set dates if not detected, etc)
• Standardise padding throughout the site, especially on the main container. It's a bit all over the place at the moment.
• Look into giving extra points as GOOD GARDEN PLANTS to those that are ATTRACTIVE + EASY TO GROW
• Import more species for Gauteng

Items requiring additional capacity/resources

The following items are great to improve but they are more complex and time-consuming that it is unlikely we can take this on until we have additional capacity / resources. Let's try and get those to improve our platform!

• Doing research into the usability and user-friendliness of the website. Ideally with someone who really knows about this. We've been building it for so long that we are no longer seeing this through the lens of a new user, and that is quite an important perspective that we should evaluate constantly.
• We should try to improve the themes and their scoring, explanation etc (such as MEDICINAL or BIRDS), with the help of specialists on those topics.
• Work on a tool that allows people to quantify/understand how their garden supports the water catchment area of the Braamfontein Spruit (from an hydrological perspective), e.g. by looking at swales, raingardens, amount of permeable soil.
• Build a full suite of tools for landscape architects. They are key collaborators in this sphere because they can influence the landscape throughout the corridor due to the size of their projects. Having specific tools for them will greatly increase the usefulness of our platform to them, and thus increase usage.