Blog-like functionality for people & groups +2
Erik (erik33) suggested this in the public forum discussion:
"I think it would be cool for individuals to be able to easily write blog / journal type posts. People only have the one wiki page to post their thoughts about themselves. I would like to use wiser for my blogging needs as well. Implementation would probably be pretty simple. Allow individual people to have multiple wiki pages like groups that could be individually commented on."
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Feature-bloat and overlapping features are things that should be avoided indeed.
Having multiple wikipages box or a modified wikipages box may be the middle way here. Multiple box would just be that: more than one box for wikipages. One of which can be designated as "Group Blog" and look like the standard wikipages box. Or, it can be modified to show some part of the content for each wikipage in the box, with a "read more..." link (much like how the group header looks like now, where it takes a part of the "About" tab, with a "read more..." link). A thumnail version of the first image in each wikipage might also be shown in the "Group Blog" box.
This was because I think I heard Mike (MichaelK) said it the first time that he'd like to be able to write in the bulleting board without having to worry about archiving the entries into separate wikipages. Not to mention the ability to comment on the entries.
How will this differ with discussion forums? hmm... I'm not sure they differ much other than the fact that the first post in the discussion forums is not editable (or will only be editable within 30 minutes of hitting the "Post Comment" button). Thus, another differentiator for the "Group Blog" wikipages box, would be the ability to save and re-edit the wikipages as "draft" before publishing.
Rethinking what wikipages were originally meant for however, takes us back to the fact that wikis were meant to facilitate collaborative editing on a document, not for static documents with comments tailing them. Thus, compared to a modified wikipages box, having multiple discussion forums box would make more sense. Where one of which can be designated as "Group Blog". Multimedia WYSIWYG editing is there and it already has the RSS feed feature which is standard to blogs in the blogosphere. The modification needed would perhaps be:
Just come up with these as I write along. Does any of this make sense? Especially the modified discussion forum box for the group blog?
And back to square one to the original suggestion by Erik, which was the ability to have a personal blog in WiserEarh.
Or should we just let personal blog be hosted elsewhere and have WiserEarth stream them in to users' profile pages? This seems like a wasted opportunity to populate WiserEarth with original contents though....
Any more thoughts? |
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@Honore: I agree, as a User having Wikipages, Discussion Forums, and Bulletins seems like quite a lot already to then add Blogs on top of the UI. Could we think about combining some of these together - or eliminating one in favor of the other? If so what options might there be?
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Regarding group blogs, we put that on hold while we were working on offering multiple bulletin boards. Our thought process was that group admins could designate one board to be a blog for the group, and just update it as necessary. So, it was a temporary stand-in to see if it would meet the needs of our users.
Blogs is something I'm fully in support of, and would love to see a wordpress implementation on WiserEarth. We've been cautious about going forward with it, mainly because we're worried about the "feature-bloat" effect. Namely, this refers to the overwhelming amount of features presented to a new user. We would to consolidate this presentation before we embark on adding any new features, so blogs has been put on the back burner.
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Michael (MichaelK) seems to be experimenting with the group feature for this at a group named after his name Michael Kwan. Maybe this is inline with what Erik had in mind?
However, a group is a group and should not be used for a single user. If this is the approach that will be taken, a blog section/entity/unit needs to be created based on the group feature/functionality. But I've heard comments suggesting that WE should adopt popular opensource blog engine like wordpress. That would of course entail more tinkering with the code to conform with WE's software architecture.
@Angus: It'd be cool to be able to link personal blog posts to groups. Group blogs by the way, is under development at the moment. Perhaps Honore or someone from the development team can fill us in on this?
I imagine group blog will be distinct in that they can only be written by administrators of a group and select members which can be given temporary or permanent permission to write to it. As Erik pointed out, a blog post should look more like a wikipage with a comment section than a discussion thread. It will differ with the standard wikipage listing too, in the sense that like common blog posts, each entry will contain a short excerpt of the content with a "more..." or "read on..." link. |
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Like it too. Presume a personal blog on a profile page should be able to show up in any group. Also that the blog functionality be extended to groups - i.e. group blogs. For UI purposes we would need to make a clear ditinction between a blog and a group discussion - what would that be? Then question only becomes one of permissions - who is entitled to write to the blog.
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I think this is a good idea.
It' been suggested several times in the past, but oerhaps we can discuss further how this should look like and how it will integrate with WiserEarth's platform and existing features? |
Contributors to this Page
@Bowo:
I like the idea of (1) retooling existing functionality of the site (wikipages or discussion forum) since the UI will be familiar to users from their other WE experiences. But there is also the argument to (2) use existing open source standard software....like wordpress ...with its development community and user base. Allowing (3) blogs from other sites to be posted on WE and then wrapped with WE functionality (tagging, cross posting etc) is yet another option. Not really qualified to make any suggestions on this choice - suspicion that Bowo's approach (#1) is the best direction .....
In any case, I think WE will be viewed negatively by prospective group admins if Blog functionality is not offered and they may go elsewhere.