Developing OTFA

When is a page not a page? When it just will not save. We reckon this is a bug, but we are not sure what kind of bug it is. Could it be a problem with the WPMU layer? A conflict with one of the plugins? We are just not sure, so we’re testing things on the blog, publishing and reediting just to see where and when the problem persists.

11-05-08: We thought we had an answer when we edited lines in wp-includes/pluggable.php, but it hasn’t helped. Tsk. For example we delete a post and once deleted it reappears, with the home page of the blog inserted in the alert box. Huh? We’re checking the forums right now. This is bizarre!

12-05-08: Well, we have moved on, but how far I am not sure. For one thing we have discounted caching problems, and for another discovered the excellent plugin for Firefox called “Firebug”. This has narrowed the problematic behaviour to the prototype.js file. Or seems to have done. Still not sure. Anyway, we have several different iterations of this javascript and we’re about to test them one at a time.

Later: Moving on from the javascript, the server issue may have edged in front as the search for the culprit widens. It seems our hosting co. may have migrated us to microsoft servers (ugh!) from the LAMP environment which is so necessary for WPMU to function properly. If this is the case and I can get it confirmed I’ll either work around it or get them to migrate us back. The latter is preferable. But we’re still talking ifs and buts.

Later still: Well, there seems to have been a problem with the .htaccess file (it was blanked) which can’t have helped, but the javascript and AJAX is still making the posting of updates and pictures impossible. Onward!

Just a quick note to say we have been developing some small interface techniques, both for the community blogs and our overall for argyll homepage. yakking.forargyll.com has been added to our roster of blogs, and there’ll be more very soon. In the meantime, if you’d like to see the next iteration of our look, visit the community blogs after the weekend (I will say no more!).

A misnomer to some extent: the social networking part of it hasn’t worked properly yet. The two functionalities which define social networking are of course ‘friends’ and ‘groups’ and we have implemented neither. The reason? Well, the two plugins available ‘Friend’s-List’ and ‘Groups’ are either not totally implemented, or not applicable to our environment. And this is probably to do with the fact that Automattic, the people who brought us Wordpress.com are presently working on BuddyPress.com, the social networking environment for a vanilla install of WPMU.

This presents problems for extant WPMUs: with a raft of members and a great deal of content the ‘vanilla install’ means BuddyPress ain’t going to be applicable to them, in particular us. We can of course create a second install of WPMU and engage in some form of db-hackery to get the installs to share users, but it is hardly ideal. So we’re back to what we can do now:

At present it is entirely possible to produce profile pages which move some way to a social networking function. The work we have done has produced extended profiles, which also run feeds, a mini-blog and comments. We did this by cannibalising the proto-plugin Tribe (designed as a tool for gamer teams) and re-formatting the author page with among other things a double-loop and a RSS feed.

… or something. After some serious research into the functionality of bbPress, the forum package we have used for our websites, and then some serious hacking about with the code, we have done what seemed at first an impossible thing: we have integrated our main website theme in the forum. And the really joyous thing, from an internerd professional’s pov, is that everything we update the theme on the main site, the forums get updated.

And yes, I did mention forumsssss. We now have 2. One for public consumption here, and the other for the OTFA project here. This allows us to keep the OTFA forum tightly regulated and yet allow the whole site to benefit from the SEO capability of bbPress in the public forum. To access these directly from the main site, the public forum is available from the menu tabs in the header, and the OTFA forum in the lefthandside menu, under “Other OTFA websites”.

In both cases membership of the forargyll.com website is a pre-requisite, and for the OFTA forum, you must contact admin to get clearance into the relevant topic area.

Other recent developments on the site are:

• Simplification of the main design to allow easy access to the latest, greatest posts from users
• Streamlined the number of wpmu blogs to allow community ownership
• Re-registration is now required for all OFTA project members to enable them to choose their own usernames and passwords.
• We are starting to implement social network functionalities (which won’t be properly available for a while), but which you can see a preview of when you click on the author link of any post — here’s mine

One of the ever-expanding questions about the Multi-user version of WordPress is, what plugins actually work? Well, we have been road-testing a number and we’ve had the joy of instant portability (Lighter Admin Drop Menus: though we could do with some of those natty icons for the Mu-specific admin items) and the frustration of instant fatal errors. But to the list, and our criteria here is that the plug-in works as we expect for each individual blog (well it would have to be wouldn’t it). If we have had weird behaviours, we’ve checked the db and more often than not, the plugin has installed outside of the MU hierarchy of tables.

• Aggr.
• Akismet.
• All-in-One-SEO.
• Collapsing Category Menus
• Collapsing Page Menus
• Dagon Design Sitemap Generator
• Dashbar - and we have customised it and it still works!
• Event Calendar - though we’re still not really sure about this one, and think we might set up a blog for it all on its own …
• Exec-PHP
• Lighter Admin Drop Menus - the lighter way to blog
• Simple Forum — Well, this worked and was great, but then we integrated bbPress and it became redundant.
• SmartRSS — Good grief Charlie Brown! We could populate the world with blog entries with this one!

And plugins which ain’t (or don’t seem to be) MU friendly:

• Secure and Accessible PHP Contact Form — It is a great plug-in and we wanted to use it, but haven’t the nouse to get around the fatal error it causes. Ho-hum.
• Slim Stats — wants to do everything, but records nuffin. sheesh.
• Userextra — won’t play, more’s the pity because it would have been an easy way to make private forums for groups of users ….

Then of course there is the matter of bbPress and its integration with WPMU – we had it up and running within in half an hour. The only wrinkle was permalinks which completely wonked out and made running the forum on the url forum.forargyll.com a nightmare. Basically, anything other than the home page ended up at the 404 error page on the For Argyll site. So we went to a date specific post hierarchy where forargyll.com/forum can be nothing else other than a forum, and we have had to utilise the nasty /?thread=12 form.

This list is not finished and we’ve had some really interesting other bits which when resolved we’ll add.

We had a great feedback session on the websites the other day, and because of it we have peeled back the complexity of WPMU and a variety of subdomains, simplified the central website forargyll.com, revised the membership structure, secured the OFTA forum and begun the interesting process of integrating our wiki into the admin end. The feedback has been extremely useful, and while it derailed the web training session, it did so in the most productive way possible.

Evidently, we had underestimated the complexity of what we had achieved and needed to go back to the basics of useability and functionality. We’ve done that and the feedback has, thus far been very positive. The first weekend in March will be the acid test however, where we get to test the paradigm and shift expectations. I am particularly looking forward to getting the groups online and into the action!

If you have any comments in the meantime, please get in touch.

In the run up to our first session at Craignish we have been looking at expanding the functionality of the OTFA project, particularly increasing the levels of interaction we are able to accommodate through the site.

First off the blocks, and for the most part due to a suggestion by one of our team-members, we have set up a wiki. This area of the website will be used for the dissemination of information and tutorials, particularly those for the WordPress and Wiki installations. At the moment it holds the website stuff, but eventually it should have material on recording, producing and marketing all sorts of media – a lot of it contributed by the teams themselves.

Next, partially inspired by the inclement weather which has disrupted our training days, we have implemented a Live Help centre which team members can use to interact with the website team. The plan is that whenever we’re at the web face mining html, we’ll have the Live Help up on our desktop. This will represent an available timespan somewhere between 8 and 12 hours.

We’ve also implemented an instant messaging system on all of the blogs so that authors can chat to one another through the admin end. To find it users should look under the ‘Manage’ link.

And finally we have finished tweaking our use of Google Maps so that all participants in the OTFA project can add locations and have them display on the same map in the ForArgyll.com site.

Next on the agenda is a partially complete project to create a social networking facility through the Profiles section of the admin end. We have already got author feeds, profile info and (an imperfect) friends-link app., but now we need instant messaging through the profile, and enabled only for friends ….

Just a quick note to say we have just implemented a bbPress forum for the Out There For Argyll project, here. We’re still very much testing this feature, but any users of this website can log on and use it.

As you’ll see we have created forums for the overall project, and each of the confirmed communities. Next we’re hoping to allow users to define which threads are for the group only and which are for general consumption.

But aside from these issues, and that of getting the look of the thing to tie in with the ForArgyll site, the actual software runs pretty easily, and was reasonably OK to implement.

We have just added two more community blogs, ardfern.forargyll.com and womenatwork.forargyll.com, loaded them up with plugins, integrated them into the RSS WP installation and then released the ForArgyll theme on them.

We’re also investigating the possiblities of ning.com and elgg.org, because as every blogger this side of Oz keeps saying, ‘08 is Social Networking year. Hmm, I am just hoping we can get into some common members ID system, like OpenID, because as we expand we’ll need to keep track of our people, and make sure one ID/profile fits all. Already Ning.com has a WP plugin, but it is one way. Elgg doesn’t seem to have any movement on this at all. At some point there’ll be an addition to the roadmap, but in the meantime we’ll be watching the developers.

Also on the cards is a wiki, and this will be aimed at the Out There for Argyll project. Because this is another user-generated website idea it will integrate well with the present set up, although we’ll probably end up having a further uber-menu over the top of everything else.

We have just implemented the same theme portal-wide to ensure a consistent look and feel. The differing colours of the original design were not working, provoking confusion and artificial distinctions in information, so we retreated to our original Radio Fyneside red. We have also moved the main news and media site to forargyll.com – this makes all sorts of sense, not least as a bid to get us into Argyll’s Top Ten on Google et al. in short order. From this core site, all else will flow. It also means we can reserve the fyneside.com url for Fyneside Media endeavours (like the development of this portal, the recording of new programs and the addition of further services).