serendipity

[piranha]

sometimes it's funny how things converge -- i had started to look at drupal because i wanted to leave LJ for another platform, and, having already experienced running my own blog software and the inherent isolation that brings, thought of trying to switch to something that could potentially allow other people to join.

some LJers have already left, and some of those went to wordpress.com, where i created a blog to check out the offerings.

some people in yaoi fandom were also getting fed up with LJ, and started to create their own site to provide a haven for other yaoi fans.

at the same time, expatriate snigglers are making noises about missing their old community, but don't feel returning to what it is now would work.

so now i am a beta tester on the new yaoi site, which uses wordpress MU (multi-user), i am a member at wordpress.com to check out their service, i have extra motivation to play with drupal, and i can compare those without having to install wordpress MU myself. also, i have access to a largish userbase whose comments about it i can read and consider.

serendipity.

Comments

[kightp.livejournal.com]

I'd be interested in hearing anything you have to say about Drupal; the university is introducing it as our campus-wide content management system, and I've got a development site waiting for me to find time to play with it.

drupal

[pir-anha.livejournal.com]

sure thing, i'll noodle about it here.

after spending a couple of days being very confused, i am now growing more and more happy with it. it is so customizable! and i can totally revamp everything after adding content, and it fits the content beautifully into the new structure. that's probably the most remarkable thing about it.

[whey.livejournal.com]

I've been "this close" to starting up a CMS with for the main purpose of sharing links for a while. But knowing there are other (most likely better) systems in the near future makes it much easier to procrastinate and wait.

CMS for link sharing

[pir-anha.livejournal.com]

yeah, i've looked into CMSes several times over the years for various purposes, and always ended up not doing anything much except testing. but this time i think i might just have critical mass. and i do want to keep that separate from the new yaoi-daily site, since i basically don't want to live on any third party's good graces and ToS for this sort of thing. i mean they're cool and all, but they are a scanlation group too who ceases distribution upon licensing. :) i don't want hassle there.

if it actually happens, you're guaranteed an account to play with, if you like.

Re: CMS for link sharing

[whey.livejournal.com]

I most definitely like.

portability

[selki.livejournal.com]

i basically don't want to live on any third party's good graces and ToS for this sort of thing

Yes. To what degree is the content folks add to a drupal (noun?) exportable by them? For instance, I could export my (many) tags from Connotea and add them to CiteULike or Connotea with a bit of dinking.

Re: portability

[pir-anha.livejournal.com]

i don't know yet. i know there are several means of import/export and of interoperability, but i haven't looked at export in specific at all yet.

definitely needed. i've marked it down.

[aquaeri.livejournal.com]

I'd also like to hear more about what you learn.

Re: serendipity

[pir-anha.livejournal.com]

sure thing; i'll mainly talk about it here and just crosspost summaries to the various other places where it's of concern..

Does Wordpress-MU actually add anything?

[flarenut.livejournal.com]

The last time I checked on it, which was months and months and months ago, it didn't seem to get you that much further than just having a bunch of separate WP blogs with a slightly less ugly administrative interface. I would love to know different.

Re: Does Wordpress-MU actually add anything?

[pir-anha.livejournal.com]

you used a subject line! i already like you. :)

i'd love to tell you differently, but from my 2-day look at it, that seems like all it is -- it's really just a wrapper around the basic wordpress package. it can provide some semblance of a community feature because it allows multi-authoring of blogs. where it is slightly better than LJ is that it makes addition of static pages easier (such as a FAQ). where it is much worse is that you can't fine tune who has access to what beyond a really coarse grained password feature. its comment tracking features are just as pitiful. its post tracking features are worse.

it's hugely less capable than drupal overall for having different structures for conversations than merely blogstyle.

Re: Does Wordpress-MU actually add anything?

[flarenut.livejournal.com]

For what it's worth, the regular WP has/had a few pretty fine-grained access plugins (private content by groups blah blah) that could be beaten into something useful. I looked into this when I was thinking about using WP to rebuild the site for the local chapter of the National Writers Union, but since no one in the chapter actually wanted to use the site for anything it seemed pointless...

Re: Does Wordpress-MU actually add anything?

[pir-anha.livejournal.com]

thanks for mentioning that. the wordpress-MU install isn't mine, so i don't know what's under its hood, but the people there said they can't do more finely grained access control. now that i know it exists, i can go find the plugin and tell them about it. (though it might not integrate well with MU, they've apparently already come across several plugins that don't).

A sniggler drupal home?

[betonica.livejournal.com]

I, too, am very interested in what you come up with, and would be delighted to help you test it out when it gets to some level that a computer illiterate like myself can assist with. Maybe a mini mock ssm for a week or so?

I wish I could show you how the discussions are set up at my college, but they're all locked to college access only. I'll do my best to describe it, because I think it has some advantages that flarenut didn't indicate above.

First of all, it's set up in a nested fashion, with a few outer broad "topics", and then more detail further in (some things are locked so that only certain people can see and read them - a forum for discussion in a certain course, for example), and there's information about when the last post was in a given topic (I really appreciate that!). The General Discussion forum gets the most activity, and covers the past 1.5 years - before that we had different software, but our cool IT people have saved it all into an "Old Forums" section at the bottom of the page (I hope this works - you'll want a fixed-proportional font, or whatever it's called):


Forum Topics Posts Last Post

Alumni Forum

General Discussions
(For general discussions ...) 5 27 4 weeks 5 days ago
by [username1]
Public Forums

General Discussions
(..anything from anyone...) 762 16264 1 hour 22 minutes ago
by [username2]

Environmental Issues 7 79 1 week 2 days ago
by [username3]


Spiritual Life Committee 2 2 22 weeks 12 hours ago
by [username4]

Restricted Forums
I'm coming to [campus] Fall 07 23 821 3 days 20 hours ago
by [username5]


Old Forums
General Discussion 620 16544 1 year 23 weeks ago
by [username6]


There are more entries in each section - I just abbreviated it for convenience. What forums exist are set up, at this level, by the IT department (but you can request one, e.g., the Spiritual Life Committee did that). If you click through to the next level, on, say, General Discussion, you'll get a list of all 762 topics (these can be created by any user) with the one with the most recent response at the top (oh, *so* nice) and how recent that response was. Also, the software keeps track of when you've last been there, and will add a little "new response" icon to any given thread if it knows you haven't read it. That's great - I know I only have to read, say, the top three on the list without even checking the "last reply" time.

There are little things, too. We debated whether people should be able to change their displayed username on whim (a student changed his to match the username of someone else, and some student even went so far as to change his to make him look like the pres of the college) and decided that yes, anyone could do that, but if your displayed name didn't match your actual college username, it would get an asterisk after it (and one can click through to see who the user actually is if one wishes).

The discussions are pretty good. None are "owned" by the original poster, which makes it more similar to usenet than to lj.

Oh - at the first level in, each forum topic has both the creation date and original poster's name, and the latest reply date(/hr/min) and poster's name.

You can make it thread, although I haven't done so - I have most recent first. Threading works, but there's too much white space (my complaint with lj, too) and things get crammed on the rhs of the window if there's too much nesting. So that problem isn't solved, but probably could be. We did get IT to take out one of two vertical side bars, that had had the effect of greatly worsening this problem.

(oops - too verbose again... to be continued)

Re: A sniggler drupal home?

[betonica.livejournal.com]

Here's a few topics from inside the general discussion forum (I note from the above that my nice formatting doesn't work; perhaps you can guess how it should look):

Topic Replies Created Last Reply

talk about
conversation 8 1 week 19 hours ago 1 hour 22 min ago
killer by [username7] by [username2]

A smrt lady 2 1 week 12 hours ago 1 day 23 hrs ago
by [username8] by [username5]

Who was Ryan? 51 1 year 16 weeks ago 4 weeks 1 day ago
by [username9] by [username10]


The "smrt lady" topic has a link to the youtube of Miss South Carolina Teen "displaying her astounding intellect and humanitarian aspirations". Links and photos and stuff work, as in lj.

There's also the icon to the left of each line (not within the "smrt lady" discussion, but back one step, with the list of topics), with a gray envelope if you've read it, and a yellow one if you haven't. Within a given topic, the posts you haven't read say "new" in yellow, next to the poster's name.

Quoting is far from obvious, and people just make up methods (some italics, some blocks of text, etc), but you could probably design a quick and easy quote mechanism for it.

Was that more information than you needed?

Anyway, I think it works pretty well. It helps that the college community has 300 students plus staff and faculty, all with diverse opinions and interests. Mostly it's just students who post, although there are a handful of others who do. It's a lot of fun discussion; the staff don't seem to have figured out that they could use it for administrative posts, yet. I think some of the faculty run part of there class discussions in it (writing profs, frex), though I never see those, not being in the given class.

Re: A sniggler drupal home?

[selki.livejournal.com]

We debated whether people should be able to change their displayed username on whim (a student changed his to match the username of someone else, and some student even went so far as to change his to make him look like the pres of the college) and decided that yes, anyone could do that, but if your displayed name didn't match your actual college username, it would get an asterisk after it (and one can click through to see who the user actually is if one wishes).

Oh, how *smart*!

It sounds nifty.

Re: A sniggler drupal home?

[pir-anha.livejournal.com]

yes, i think that is a really nifty idea, and it's not something i've seen anywhere else before.

Re: A sniggler drupal home?

[pir-anha.livejournal.com]

techie stuff for LJ first (this is just html, so it'll work elsewhere too, if a forum allows html):

you can enclose stuff you want displayed in a fixed font with <pre> </pre>; that will preserve spacing as well. like this:

Forum                         Topics   Posts   Last Post   by

Alumni General Discussions    5        27      5 days ago  user1
Environmental Issues          7        79      2 days ago  user2

alternatively you could use an html table, but that's way too much effort here. which means i should write that down as something we want for a new venue -- gotta be easy to present information more richly, like have a WYSIWYG editor. drupal can do that; i have it running.

(i know i've compressed that table and it doesn't look like what your forum really looks like, but i got the idea -- what you described sounds like a good forum setup; i'm a member of a couple that look very similar.)

flarenut was talking about wordpress-MU as being the software that's very limited, not drupal. wordpress-MU can be seen in action at http://wordpress.com; i don't think it is good enough for what we want -- it's even more basic than LJ, though it does a couple of things better.

and you'll be very welcome when it comes to testing the site; non-computer-techie impressions are important. i am trying to decide whether i should just throw a basic setup out there, let people play, collect the comments, and add/change things on the fly, or whether i should make a concerted effort to gather ideas and form consensus first and tailor the site from the start. the former might mean people get frustrated with things not being at all what they want and lose interest. the latter might mean i'll get stuck in the research phase, which is a common failing of mine (though then somebody else could take what's been gathered and run with it).

threading

[betonica.livejournal.com]

I just realized what it is that I want with threading.

The ability to mark a post as read and have it go away is critical. Not just be dimmed or in a different color, but actually not be on the page with the list of responses in a thread. This keeps the nesting indents from getting way, waaay outa hand. I had software that did it, once (for usenet) and lost it, which is why I aways do things most-recent-first, now (hadn't realized that). The additional ability to request those things that have disappeared would be blissful ("Oh, I forget what this subthread is about, please take me up-thread one post even though I've marked it as read").

Does any interface that allows reading of lj currently do such a thing?

I'm going to ask our IT people whether they can make it work with drupal; I'm guessing not, but wouldn't it be cool?

Re: threading

[pir-anha.livejournal.com]

i don't know of any software other than several usenet newsreaders that can do this.

but i have one huge blind spot: RSS readers. i use LJ's flist reader for aggregating feeds and haven't really used a dedicated RSS reader since their early days when they sucked (now and then opera tries to get me to use its RSS reader when a google search ends me at a feed instead of a regulara webpage). RSS reader have also always struck me as being primarily for reading other people's news, not for interacting with those people a lot.

in gnus (the newsreader i use) i can tell it with one keypress to show or not show threads or subthreads or posts on any number of conditions, me having read articles already being just one (same for "unreading" already read messages). gnus actually can also read RSS feeds, though it was slow last time i checked. the problem with gnus is that i can never convince most of my friends to use it, it requires too much technical know-how. and now that i use gmail and rarely visit usenet, i don't use gnus myself anymore. though i might pick that up again if what we come up with can provide the right interface.

marking as read/unread

[pir-anha.livejournal.com]

i am going to pay special attention to all the available drupal forum modules to see whether anything looks like it can handle this. beyond that i guess one might have to look at other forum systems (many of which can be integrated with drupal).

if there isn't anything yet i hope your IT people are programmers and can make it happen. it's not like it'd be programmatically impossible, but how hard it will be depends on how much data is already kept for each user. obviously the last time you visited the forum is kept, but that's just one datum. keeping track of all the posts you've read is a different thing. hm. though some forums let you mark threads as read, so they definitely keep fine-grained track. or do they? my RSS reader in opera (which i checked out yesterday) lets me do that, maybe i am confused.

i can unfortunately not write this kind of thing myself because i can no longer program complex tasks.

[lorres.livejournal.com]

I'm so glad you want to discuss all these things. I guess my most desired quality is the same as Allison's - make items marked "read" go away so that scanning down the thread searching for the point where I left of reading doesn't have to be done each time.

Thanks so much for thinking about all this - I trust you so much that I'm not sure what else I can say.

marking as read/unread

[pir-anha.livejournal.com]

the forum allison is talking about allows for a different approach instead -- she can sort the things that are new since she last read the forum to the top, so they list before anything else.

would that work well enough for you? most forum software i've seen can do that. i know that ideally i want more, i am just wondering how much is sufficient to make people want to use it.

and thanks for your trust. *feels all warm and fuzzy now*. though don't trust me too much; i am much less reliable about following through with projects than i once was. which is why i am gonna try and process all this out loud, so if i drop the ball somebody else can pick it up.