The templates for our community site are done. I have even started to move some of our off-site blogs into our new Movable Type based site. Our community site is composed of three things. Hit the jump for a brief explanation and a screen shot of the completed templates. This post is meant to be a broad overview of our community site.
Community Site: In MT terms this is a Community Blog, which is open for
anyone who has signed up for an account can blog about whatever they
wish. We will be using this for specific communities such as Family
& Parent Programs, as well as community reporting, etc.
Forum: In MT terms this is a Community Forum, which acts just like any
other forum you may have used, only it is more lightweight than you may
be used to. The best reason for using it is that I do not have to
integrate yet another authentication system to get it to work with MT,
since it is MT. The Community Forum is very much like the Community
Blog in interaction, though the the differences between blogs and
forums hold true here as well.
Blog: In MT terms this is a Classic Blog. A blog is a blog like you are
used to, it has one or more authors who write entries, and people
comment on them. This differs from a Community Blog as there are no
outside people contributing as well. I just finished moving our BG News
Sports Blog and that process went pretty well.
Each site, be it a community, forum, or blog, will have a mobile counterpart. Thanks to the magic of multiple publishing paths. All the mobile sites will be indexed at the main site, m.bgviews.com, which I have not even talked about on this blog yet.
If you want a blog, you can sign up for one. If you want a community site, you can sign up for one of those as well. And of course, you guessed it, you can sign up for a forum if that is your cup of tea. You need to have a native account to be able to post entries, but we have many ways to post comments. This is to facilitate ease of commenting, as some people do not want to sign up for an account. You can comment using the following methods: MT Native, OpenID, LiveJournal, Vox, TypeKey, Yahoo!, AIM, WordPress.com, and Facebook. Oh and you can comment anonymously too, though annonymous comments will not be published automatically.
For signing up for an account, you gain access to a number of things from launch and in the near future. Although the User Profile page is not completely fleshed out yet, here is what it looks like for an active member.
Future User Profiles will have more fields and the design of the Profile will look a lot nicer. You can see who you are following, who is following you, as well as see what entries you have written, commented on, and favorited. There is also a tab to keep track of your comment threads on the site. Action Streams will be integrated into your User Profile soon as well. They will look something like this, which you can see live on the dev blog.
I have even added support for BGSU Weblogs in there. So when you update your BGSU Weblog, it will link to it here. Read two post posts about Action Streams.
Our community site will have full mobile browser support. Other miscilanous features we have are polls, podcasting support, and on the geekier side of things, search engine optimization including a dynamic sitemap.xml for each blog/site.
I know that is a lot to digest, but that is the basic overview. And it will all be launched very soon!
Forum: In MT terms this is a Community Forum, which acts just like any
other forum you may have used, only it is more lightweight than you may
be used to. The best reason for using it is that I do not have to
integrate yet another authentication system to get it to work with MT,
since it is MT. The Community Forum is very much like the Community
Blog in interaction, though the the differences between blogs and
forums hold true here as well.
Blog: In MT terms this is a Classic Blog. A blog is a blog like you are
used to, it has one or more authors who write entries, and people
comment on them. This differs from a Community Blog as there are no
outside people contributing as well. I just finished moving our BG News
Sports Blog and that process went pretty well.
Each site, be it a community, forum, or blog, will have a mobile counterpart. Thanks to the magic of multiple publishing paths. All the mobile sites will be indexed at the main site, m.bgviews.com, which I have not even talked about on this blog yet.If you want a blog, you can sign up for one. If you want a community site, you can sign up for one of those as well. And of course, you guessed it, you can sign up for a forum if that is your cup of tea. You need to have a native account to be able to post entries, but we have many ways to post comments. This is to facilitate ease of commenting, as some people do not want to sign up for an account. You can comment using the following methods: MT Native, OpenID, LiveJournal, Vox, TypeKey, Yahoo!, AIM, WordPress.com, and Facebook. Oh and you can comment anonymously too, though annonymous comments will not be published automatically.
For signing up for an account, you gain access to a number of things from launch and in the near future. Although the User Profile page is not completely fleshed out yet, here is what it looks like for an active member.
Future User Profiles will have more fields and the design of the Profile will look a lot nicer. You can see who you are following, who is following you, as well as see what entries you have written, commented on, and favorited. There is also a tab to keep track of your comment threads on the site. Action Streams will be integrated into your User Profile soon as well. They will look something like this, which you can see live on the dev blog.
I have even added support for BGSU Weblogs in there. So when you update your BGSU Weblog, it will link to it here. Read two post posts about Action Streams.Our community site will have full mobile browser support. Other miscilanous features we have are polls, podcasting support, and on the geekier side of things, search engine optimization including a dynamic sitemap.xml for each blog/site.
I know that is a lot to digest, but that is the basic overview. And it will all be launched very soon!
Leave a comment