NZMac.com - Supporting the New Zealand Mac community - It's all about community

It's all about community - New features for 2006

Written by Philip Roy

Saturday, 31 December 2005

In my podcasts (the last podcast for the year on NZMac.com) I commented that there would be some new features coming to the site. One of these new features started off with the desire to do something quite simple on the site but has lead ultimately to some great enhancements starting today and possible enhancements in the future.

So...let's find out what is brewing in 2006.

I had wanted to add a really simple feature to the site. When I do get someone other than me to write a review, Local Voices article or feature, I always encourage them to give me a little biography to go with the story, but these are all manually added to each article.

My idea was that I wanted a sort of "About the Author" link in each article that would take you to a page about the actual Author. At the same time, in a very roundabout way, I had been keeping eye on a superb component for Joomla called "Community Builder". Then, just before Christmas, someone released a small patch to the CB project that linked the user name (e.g. "By Philip Roy") to a CB profile...so my author-link idea was now doable in a slightly different way.

Community Builder is in fact a huge component for Joomla (the open source Content Management System that this site runs on) and the addition of it into the site brings in a range of small new features today, and some I'm mulling over for the future.

From today there will be a new permanent menu section on the left column of the site. The Community menu will allow non-registered users to look at a list of all registered users of the site (those with active profiles and who have logged in are promoted more than those that haven't) and find out a little bit more about them. A "Registered" user for NZMac.com is one who has registered to use the discussion forum. These users are now able to upload a photo of themselves to be displayed under their community profile, write a small bio/profile to let others know a little bit about themselves and even put their longitude/latitude values into their profile to join an interactive map of all site users.

But that's just the start.

Gradually you'll see a number of new features added. For example, if your user name matches your name in the Newsletter section, you can now check your subscription from this community section. If you aren't subscribed, you can now subscribe this way (let me know if you start getting two sets of newsletters as I need to work on tying the two systems together better).

If you've written an article, I'll be working over the next couple of weeks to make sure your article links to your community profile and from there, more features should come on board also.

But it's not all plain sailing.....unfortunately the link between the forum and the community component isn't as advanced as others...in fact it's a bit of a hack at the moment. So forum users will have two profiles for quite some time...the info you entered into the forum at registration, and some other info in the community section.

To help with this, I've tried to make it obvious you have two profile areas by adding a new button in the forum. I'm working on building a bridge between the two, but I'm no coder and hacking code isn't that easy when you aren't (thanks to the Joomla community for all their incredible help so far).

Please please please be aware that the use of this component is going to take some time to bed in...there are bugs that I need to fix and there are features that I need to decide whether to activate or not.

For example, the component allows for individual galleries as well as blogs. While that sort of feature is great for many sites, I need to convince myself that these tie in with the concept of an NZ Mac site and also make sure that once made available, they don't get abused by the very small group of people who register just to cause havoc. The additional cost to traffic and file space will also be a deciding factor for me

So at the moment, no blogs or galleries, but those that have read this far are welcome to start a thread about it and argue your point. I've not hidden the fact that these features are possible, I just need some time to think and join in a discussion on it.

One of the others aspects that will be a work in progress over the next few weeks will be the community section guidelines, which will develop as the months progress and are posted in the forum.

I hope you enjoy the new features added to the site today. One thing I've always wanted to say...

"But wait...that's not all"

Yes, there is another little project I have been playing with over the past few months. I hope to get back to it shortly and then make an announcement. It's an idea that is at the heart of the Mac community concept and one that I hope you'll all embrace and contribute to when announced.

Welcome to NZMac.com 2006 :-)

Cheers,

Phil

PS If your profile looks scarce, it's because sections like the "About Me" tab will not appear under your name until you go and put something in there. Make sure you log in to do it.