Forgive me for not reading this open letter from Mark Zuckerberg until late Friday. I don't login to Facebook as often as I used to, but more on that later. His letter on the further changes to Networks was written Tuesday, so I am sure this is old news to some. I assume Mashable has covered this by now (they have, but they glossed over the negative by-product of the long-overdue privacy changes Zuck announced).

All the images will be broken until mtvU sets up the blogs.bgviews.com record to the new IP. Sorry but it will look kinda drab until then.

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.

Today I setup this developer blog. It will be used to update everyone on additions and changes to the site, and include important how-to documentation for the authors of our community site.

So what is the purpose of this blog? This is merely an informative blog for the authors who write at blogs.bgviews.com. This does not just include the staff of BG News, but all authors who have "Editor" privs on our community blogs. Community writers may find something here to interest them too, you never know.

Major thanks to Byrne Reese for updating this slick template to MT4. I figured I would use this instead of the plain  "Minimalist" theme that is default for "Classic Blog" in MT4.

Unlike the other blogs on this site, this is not a "Community Blog" so not everyone can contribute articles, but you can still comment.

And yes, I will replace that header image with something a little more Bowling Green-y ;)

You can always contact me here: webmaster [at] bgviews [dot] com.

MTCS, or Movable Type Community Solution (follow this link for more on MTCS), is a commercial piece of software from Six Apart that we are using to manage our blogs for the newspaper, and our community blogs -- which we have not launched yet.

I am in the process of getting things going, but for the sake of an example, please see the my default user profile. I am not done adding fields to the profile, nor have I started to customize it in any way, but User Profiles is one thing that MTCS has. It also supports Community Blogs and Community Forums.

While MT is not exactly forum software, it is nice to have a single login for both blogs and forums. It also satisfies most of our "forum" needs.

Another nifty feature that MTCS has is user recommendations. They have been turned on to registered users, however.

You might be asking why do we need MTCS? College Publisher provides blogs and forums. College Publisher provides a single blog, no more, and they do provide forums. However, they do not provide the expandability that we want, so we are augmenting with MTCS.

I can answer more specific questions, so please post a comment. I must say that since I am quite busy I have to give priority to those who work in West Hall.

If you are still scratching your head: BG Views is a community site that has not launched yet, but will be for BGSU, our newspaper The BG News, and the Bowling Green community and surrounding area. This blog is for the content authors, not just those who work at The BG News. Though much has been finished behind the scenes, there is not much that is presentable to the public. I will be using this blog to tally updates to the site, give out some information on the development process, and, later on, use this blog as a "how-to" guide for authors.

If you are a group or organization that would like to help beta test, please contact me, Ken Edwards, here: webmaster [at] bgviews [dot] com.