So as you can see a little progress here thanks to Dee, but still not much on the other front so I will tell you what I am trying to achieve.
Activity Feed – Looking to create a similar activity feed like at the old site. Unfortunately WordPress and Drupal aren’t made the same so having to try and figure out the PHP code myself. Also with BuddyPress added (which is the plugin that gives WordPress all the multi-person functions) trying to find the right code snipets to use is a little more difficult that advertised.
The Basics – Lets not forget what makes the New Babbage site great. We have forums, blogs, events, and images. I don’t think hosting images on this website would be the best plan but do have a plugin that will allow for us to post a flickr gallery here (which apparently since the newest updates of wordpress don’t work anymore so will looking something else). I haven’t really tested the events plugin yet and the forums seem to have issues with roles which I need to look into as well.
Roles – Speaking of which with the roles I want to make sure every sign-ed in person that we know is not a spammer has the ability to create their own content (image, event, blog post, forum post, comment) and of course have the ability to delete or edit said content. Higher roles of course will have more responsibilities like adding new users, or maybe helping fix up the site.
User Creation – So far setting it as anyone can join even has led to at least 20 to 30 new spam users every day. I want it to be easy for anyone to actually join the website, just not spam robot accounts. So for the moment it will be the same as the old site where you have to get someone to sign you up. Will really be looking into alternatives though, just don’t want it to be a deluge of spam users.
Now that aside I know there are not many people logged in here so I will probably post this in the current site as well for actual info, But is there anything you want me to try to add that we don’t currently have in the old group, or take away that there is no point in having. I have heard that the Groups on the website seem to be a pointless thing rather than of any use to us so do we still need it. Please feel free to add it as a comment here.
Thanks for the input.
Cyan
This is solid progress. I wouldn’t discard Groups just yet as I can see a future use for such things as roleplayers working on a story or event managers having a discussion space. Inworld groups are fine as long as everyone is inworld at the same time but we know timezones can make that difficult.
Update
Forums – For some reason on the dashboard you can’t access the forums but can easily do so through the main page. Will need to probably make some dashboard widget too for the forums.
So I was thinking Spam control would be good so I went and purchased Akismet… and all they do is block spam from being posted, rather than spammers from creating an account in the first place. So I ended my subscription and turned it off. I’m almost thinking the personal monitoring of new users is the best way to go still.
Tomorrow I’ll try those two I told you about. The bot decoy should work all by itself.
Well looks like I should take a closer look at the friendship module, and/or profiles. Friend request from Garnet to Rayn worked but was… complicated. Getting to the user profile in order to accept request and getting to that request in general shouldn’t have been that difficult. Will look into simplifying the process.
Looking at the user profile in detail makes me think it would be easier to bypass the typical backend settings and just go to the Profile itself as it has it’s own settings. Which leads me into…
Menu – The Menu in which you access everything in wordpress seems… flawed. The main menu brings up what feels like just admin type controls to the site. While not a bad thing really it feels like it’s pulling people away from the site itself. I’m looking at a menu program right now but thinking it maynot be the way to go and may see about a main page menu/link-set to better access things inside the site.
I keep on looking at plugins and keep seeing all the really good features I want are pay for use. So thinking of just trying to figure out how to do some of these things myself.
Great news! The widget I already had for Site Wide Activity seems to work properly now (must have been fixed in an update cause it didn’t used to be this good) So activity is fixed. Just not sure if people want to see profile changes or avatar changes. Either way this leaves me to be able to do other things so YAY!
Do’h scratch that… forgot that they don’t really work well with comments. Back to the drawing board.
Well done on catching up
So I’m finally understanding why it’s been so difficult to merge the comments and posts into one stream. Comments seem to be a separate entity that is not handled the same way posts are, which I find rather absurd. So everything else is treated like a post/page but comments are not. I suppose I understand why. If we treated every comment like a post then it would get it’s own page and that would just mean more bulk but it makes trying to combine them into a stream properly difficult. This does not mean I will stop trying… it just means it will take a bit more time than I hoped.