PDCOM 2.0: THE NEXT LEVEL

[Telarus]

This is an interesting way of going about it. I've never used the sites rss feed, that brings up EVERY new thread in a specific forum doesn't it? Have you found a way to tailor it to pick out specific threads?

The main site feed seems to post the last 5 posts. I'm sure that could be configured. Haven't checked out the sub-forum feeds, tho.

I'm learning Ontologies/Semantic Web stuff.... since most of the crawlers out there are specifically setup to read meta-data inserted throughout the page (
and all the major news services use this to tag all of a stories' content automatically on the first pass). You know those sites which auto-highlight certain words and then link them to product pages ? Yeah, that's a horriblly intrusive use of the Semantic Web stuff. But Google, etc, all use the semantic tags that aren't seen by human readers to filter/sort/serve search results. Which is an awesome (behind the scenes) use of the Ontologies, etc. [I'm sure Faust is somewhat familiar with this, just in case anyone else wondered what I was going on about...]

If we do setup a feed site (and I like the ideas here), where we nominate content to post, then I can help tag it all appropriately so we can get more search engine traffic.

[Verbal Mike]

FWIW, WordPress uses tags both for internal searchability and for crawlers (and there are plugins to make it even more crawler-friendly) and tags are ridiculously easy to use there. And there's a plugin called Zemanta (available for other systems as well afaik) which suggests tags based on what tags are common and found in the wording of the post.

[Verbal Mike]

I get these emails from wordpress.com about new themes, and here's one that could be pretty useful for making a magazine-style homepage:
http://thecolumnistdemo.wordpress.com/

[Telarus]

Ooooh. I like that template. Lots of good layout space and good image use.

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

Yeah, I like it too!

[Bebek Sincap Ratatosk]

I had played around with something that tried to mesh articles and forums together. Basically the idea was that everything was in a forum, but if a specific flag was set on an OP, it became an "Article" in the front end CMS. Comments to the article were simply the thread discussions.

If an OP is written to stand on its own (Poetry, Essay, Rant etc) it gets flagged as an article. If its just a kickoff for a discussion it lives in the forum only. So if you looked at the site through the 'forum' view it was just as it is today. If you looked at the site through the CMS view, you saw the OP's that had been flagged as articles with a link to the thread itself labeled "Discuss Here" or something obvious.

In that case, we'd only need to create a front end view which selected thread OP's with the article flag set and some CSS for formatting.

I think... I think... it could be done pretty easily.

ETA:

Even more simple...

We create a Forum specifically for 'articles'. Then the "magazine" view simply pulls the OP's from that specific forum/subforums, presents them as 'articles' with links to the thread for discussion. I'm pretty sure this could be hacked together without much work.

As for how it would affect the site psychology... I think it would definitely change things. Content that is meant for large scale consumption would be highly visible... Roger's rants, Cain's Political discussions etc all stand on their own... discussion of them is great, but there's never gonna be as much discussion on those thread as there is on a thread about drugs, daily life, random Fox News BS etc. In this format, their content would stay visible rather than drowning in a thousand other discussions. Anyone visiting the 'zine view would see their stuff without digging through all of our  chaotic chatter.

Hell, sometimes I think of something I'd like to say on one of their posts, but they've been lost to the thread pile. IF they were available on a 'front end' it would make it much easier to find and discuss even weeks after the OP. It would also open discussion up to people that aren't here all the time, maybe only show up weekly or are around for the first time.

[Bebek Sincap Ratatosk]

Can one of the admins tell me (via PM is fine) which database/version and schema we're using with SMF? Playing around a bit here...

[Verbal Mike]

If an OP is written to stand on its own (Poetry, Essay, Rant etc) it gets flagged as an article. If its just a kickoff for a discussion it lives in the forum only. So if you looked at the site through the 'forum' view it was just as it is today. If you looked at the site through the CMS view, you saw the OP's that had been flagged as articles with a link to the thread itself labeled "Discuss Here" or something obvious.

I really like this concept, it would make the integration between the site's two "faces" much more natural. But I am a bit worried that people are too lazy to click "discuss here", then suddenly see the 20 weird comments the spags here have already made, and register and join the discussion. I mean, it's fine if it's more about showcasing quality material than attracting more interaction, but in today's web doing that is kind of weird. Maybe it would be possible to have the area under the article automatically show the comments from the forum, with a special theme/css set-up that makes it looks more like just normal comments under an article, and with some automatic guest log-in for adding anonymous comments? Like basically something that's technically simple, actually doesn't create any parallel system to the forum, but makes it feel like a normal blog/'zine where anyone can comment?

[Sir Bearington]

Here's my entry:



I'm sure some of you are now saying "but Cain, that's exactly what the front page looks like right now."

Yes.  It is.

The problem with PD isn't software based, there isn't a software solution.  No amount of rearranging deckchairs is going to change the fact that it is people's attitudes that need to change, not our "web 2.0 user drive feedback functionality" bullshit.

If it makes you feel any better, I saved the screenshot in Paint, so it's kinda WOMP.

I claim copyright of richard nixon's festering corpse.

And on another note, did somebody say content?

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

I had played around with something that tried to mesh articles and forums together. Basically the idea was that everything was in a forum, but if a specific flag was set on an OP, it became an "Article" in the front end CMS. Comments to the article were simply the thread discussions.

If an OP is written to stand on its own (Poetry, Essay, Rant etc) it gets flagged as an article. If its just a kickoff for a discussion it lives in the forum only. So if you looked at the site through the 'forum' view it was just as it is today. If you looked at the site through the CMS view, you saw the OP's that had been flagged as articles with a link to the thread itself labeled "Discuss Here" or something obvious.

In that case, we'd only need to create a front end view which selected thread OP's with the article flag set and some CSS for formatting.

I think... I think... it could be done pretty easily.

ETA:

Even more simple...

We create a Forum specifically for 'articles'. Then the "magazine" view simply pulls the OP's from that specific forum/subforums, presents them as 'articles' with links to the thread for discussion. I'm pretty sure this could be hacked together without much work.

As for how it would affect the site psychology... I think it would definitely change things. Content that is meant for large scale consumption would be highly visible... Roger's rants, Cain's Political discussions etc all stand on their own... discussion of them is great, but there's never gonna be as much discussion on those thread as there is on a thread about drugs, daily life, random Fox News BS etc. In this format, their content would stay visible rather than drowning in a thousand other discussions. Anyone visiting the 'zine view would see their stuff without digging through all of our  chaotic chatter.

Hell, sometimes I think of something I'd like to say on one of their posts, but they've been lost to the thread pile. IF they were available on a 'front end' it would make it much easier to find and discuss even weeks after the OP. It would also open discussion up to people that aren't here all the time, maybe only show up weekly or are around for the first time.

I really like this idea, and if people have in the past written articles they'd like moved to the articles thread, they can either repost them or ask a mod to move them.

Requiring registration to comment is very common these days, so I don't think that would be a deterrent for people who wanted to join the discussion.

[tyrannosaurus vex]

SO LET'S DO IT ALREADY! GOSH!

[Bebek Sincap Ratatosk]

I've installed a local environment that matches the PD.com set up.

I have found the following:

We can create a "View" over the tables in SMF which gives us back a specific set of information matching what we want. We can create a php script (or a more complex PHP framework using Model/View/Controller) to query the view and return the Title, Author, Content as well as the Board Name (to be used as a Category on the front end) and the topic ID which is used to link the article to the thread within SMF.

So the basic function works right now on my system... its ugly, because I'm not doing any kind of template, but it works. It spits out:

Title
Author
Content

Title
Author
Content

etc.

This weekend I'm gonna try to build this out in a MVC framework and maybe create some kind of basic template for the content.

[tyrannosaurus vex]

I love you guys.

[Triple Zero]

I's got PM from Rat and his idea seems solid. Hey and since the Young Researchers are closed over summer holidays for the next 2-3 weeks I might actually have time to work on this too

Alternatively,

Telarus, how do we make it so the front page looks like THAT?

[Bebek Sincap Ratatosk]

So thinking about basic front end requirements:

Display all articles, based on DATE (most recent first), include pagination.
Display articles only from a specific board (category).
Display articles only from a specific author.
Basic search on article content.

Content should include:
Category, Title, Author, Content, link to discussion

Am I missing anything?