Setting up the site for Member Participation

This entry is a successful test of a stand alone entry form (SAEF) to enable users to add articles to the blog.  Our goal is to turn this website into a more user-friendly venue for exploring focus fusion.  Your input is appreciated!

The SAEF is at an undisclosed URL.  We’re not going live with it yet.  I’m just fascinated at how easily it works.  Before we go live, we have to think this through.

Many entries in the forums belong on the website proper. 

The SAEF will make it easy for users to post here directly.  What’s the best way to do this?  Do we set it up as user blogs?  Should we distinguish these from the official site posts that cover news and announcements?  It would be easy to do this by simply creating a seperate “user weblog” for the job.  These can be posted in the member’s profiles, and also in other designated areas throughout the website.

Oh dear.  That means we’ll need to format the member profiles to match better with the rest of the site.  Right now, it’s just default setting.

We’ll also have to add tags, to improve labeling of topics.  The “category” function is limiting.  There’s some easy software I can install for that.  In fact, see this site - http://www.solspace.com/software/ - for different modules that fit with our current set up. 

I like the tags, with the handy tag clouds and so forth. 

“Digg” type functionality would be good too.  There’s a simple fix to give us this functionality within the site, as well.  Ratings might also be a good idea.  (The software above has different uses for “digging” and “rating”.)

I also need to scrape the gallery we have now and find a more functional one.  Something that enables users to upload images as well as making it easier for us to do so.  Right now it’s a little difficult to manipulate the images.  Video recommendations and embedding by users is also a welcome idea. 

All of this needs to be able to happen on the fly.

A lot of content is not getting on this site that belongs here.  We need to develop this site to reach its potential.  And by “we”, I mean “me”, unfortunately!  Volunteers for web development are welcome!  Please!

I will link this post to a forum article so that we can continue to discuss this idea.  I’d like to hear more suggestions and requests for functionality.

There’s a lot of energy out there, I can feel it!