[isf-wifidog] WiFiDog Roadmap, first draft

[Gabe Sawhney]

There's been little discussion about Benoit's roadmap except for the 
mysql support issue.  You guys had a meeting on the 14th, I think -- 
what was the result?

WirelessToronto's priority right now is content.  I'm happy to see 
François <http://old.ilesansfil.org/wiki/Fran%c3%a7oisProulx>' 
documentation on the content distribution system, but I'm still really 
confused by it.  It's be particularly useful if someone who understands 
it could write a "walkthrough" simply describing how to post content 
(even just a chunk of html) on a portal page... I fiddled with it for a 
while, with only moderate success.  If our developers here can get a 
good understanding of it, we'll surely contribute towards improving the 
documentation and/or interface to make it easier to use.

Other priorities for us:

- Including (average) session lengths in the reports pages.  This is an 
essential stat for PR purposes.  (How is logout time determined?)

- Giving users the ability to get back to the portal page after having 
left it.  My thought was to build a little app to put on 
wirelesstoronto.ca which would check to see if visitors' IP address 
matches with any of the last_heartbeat_ips in the nodes table -- if it 
does, then include a link saying "Welcome to hotspot X! Click here for 
the portal page."  Or somesuch.  It doesn't need to be 100% reliable, it 
just needs to work most of the time. 

- MAC address whitelisting.  (My interpretation of this: on a 
hotspot-specific-basis, certain specified MAC addresses would be 
identified by the router as "friendly" and automatically logged in, 
without being redirected to the login or portal pages.)  It'd be ideal 
if this was launched in conjunction with the previous feature, to make 
it simple for these users to get to the portal page if they wanted.  I'd 
like to offer this functionality essentially just to hotspot owners.

- We're considering requiring that "remote" users must log in in order 
to see the portal page of a hotspot if they're not physically at that 
spot.  (Are there any major reasons not to do this?  Would this be very 
difficult?)

- Another angle on the above: some stuff shouldn't appear on portal 
pages if you're logging in remotely.  In particular, it'd be nice if the 
list of users currently logged in was only accessible locally -- it's a 
bit creepy otherwise.

- It'd be nice to streamline the user signup / validation / login 
process a bit (ie, automatically loggin people in once they've created 
their account).  Especially to address the problem of accidental 
"virtual" logins.  I have no idea how this part works yet.

Gabe