Developing OTFA

… 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