Wow, this is amazing! (plus **VISION**)

[Martin Thoene]

This is excellent news indeed! I'm now actually writing this in Firefox 2 and purposely spelled excellent wrong......instant red line appeared under it. How cool is that?

I look forward to seeing this new site and working with the software.

Martin.

[shafer]

Just an update on my progress today (Wednesday). Setting up the site and making example pages has been pretty easy so far. I'm trying to structure things such that it will be easy to find pages/images when the full species index is finished. (It's much easier, of course, to have an "organizational" system when there are only 2 species listed!)

Probably the most complicated part so far was setting up the security system. I've spent all evening testing things, but here's what I have right now:

1.) All of you moderators, of course, will have 'manager' accounts that let you edit any page in the site
2.) Anyone can create a new 'user' account. (It has the same email confirmation style that the forum does to cut down on automated spam accounts).
3.) A regular 'user' account is ONLY good (at the present) for posting comments at the bottom of pages. (This will make all those people happy who only want to write 3 sentences about how cool their favorite loach is.)
4.) Moderators can get a list of recent comments and delete any inappropriate (or just plain dumb!) ones.
5.) Regular 'user' accounts CANNOT upload images/create pages anywhere. I've hidden their "Member Folder" option that normal Plone websites have and everything else is locked down by default.
6.) If we approve specific users (probably active, well-known active forum contributors), I can individually unhide their Member Folder and let them create content in that restricted area. This way, we can gradually bring new moderators on board. Or, active forum members can have a place to create their own small websites or post images for the loach forum. This way, new users can create pages in private and the moderators can approve the final result before moving the page to the public site. (In contrast, all you 'managers' can edit pages right in the public site)

Sound good?

Jeff

[Mark in Vancouver]

This, I'd like to see! Sounds amazing, JS.

[Martin Thoene]

That sounds like an ideal setup to me. I'm looking forward to getting "hands-on" with it.

Speaking of automatic spam accounts I've seen a few highly suspect new member tags popping up on the forum lately that are sometimes blatantly that type. Do you check every so often and kill the account or what?
Some of us have caught sexual content posts or advertising type things and deleted them.

Oh...another thing I thought to ask the other day. How is the site protected as regards its content back-up. What if there was some disaster. Would the content be lost in any way?

Martin.

[shafer]

Speaking of automatic spam accounts I've seen a few highly suspect new member tags popping up on the forum lately that are sometimes blatantly that type. Do you check every so often and kill the account or what?

Oh...another thing I thought to ask the other day. How is the site protected as regards its content back-up. What if there was some disaster. Would the content be lost in any way?

1.) There are a ton of non-activated accounts that are clearly junk, along with a much smaller number of activated accounts that post junk too. I've never bothered to clean out the non-activated accounts since I figure they don't hurt anything. (I'd probably have to find a separate add-on tool and install it to accomplish that). How frequent are the junk posts that make it onto the board? There are other technological band-aids I can try and use, but I'm not sure if it's worth the effort for a few bad posts that are easily deleted.

2.) Both the old and new sites and forums are backed up by the ISPs, but this week I'm going to write my own additional daily backup/archive system for the new site. (And test that the backup can actually be restored easily). Backing up this new site is somewhat different than the regular Loaches Online, which already has a backup copy on my personal harddrive.

[shari2]

Sounds terrific Jeff.
Can't wait to see it!

[Martin Thoene]

Those odd posts are just an annoyance, not a real problem. with our relatively international time spread there's usually someone who can X anything that hits a forum.

I can guess that backing up this new site would be different. Its very changeability means the backup needs to be a daily thing right? I was just thinking a sort of collective CYA move in the highly unlikely possibility of someone with editing access having a mental aberration and deciding to go in there and remove or drastically alter a bunch of stuff (for whatever reason).
Another reason for that is if someone somehow accidentally made some huge cock-up and deleted something by mistake, would it be recoverable?

Martin.

[shari2]

Question:

Or, active forum members can have a place to create their own small websites or post images for the loach forum. This way, new users can create pages in private and the moderators can approve the final result before moving the page to the public site.

When a private page is moved to the public site does it change anything for the user, such as how they get to the page, what they get to do, etc? Will they have to re-bookmark and still be able to develop their page, or will they have pages in both places? I'm assuming that some people will figure out the Plone capabilities and want to do more with their pages than just loachy stuff...in effect will this software enable people to create their own 'website'?

Or will we only be moving folders from their pages, rather than the whole thing?

[shafer]

Question:
When a private page is moved to the public site does it change anything for the user, such as how they get to the page, what they get to do, etc? Will they have to re-bookmark and still be able to develop their page, or will they have pages in both places? I'm assuming that some people will figure out the Plone capabilities and want to do more with their pages than just loachy stuff...in effect will this software enable people to create their own 'website'?

Or will we only be moving folders from their pages, rather than the whole thing?

If a page is moved from a user folder into the regular site, that user can still edit it even if they are not a moderator/manger. (The page will still be owned by the original user). It will be moved, not copied, so there will only be one location for it, not in both places.

You could create a non-loach website in your member directory, but all of the pages will have the Loaches Online theme/skin surrounding it, plus a loaches.com address, so it wouldn't be very useful!

Jeff

[shari2]

thanks Jeff. In spite of having the plone software on my machine, I haven't gotten very far in figuring out it's capabilities...

[shafer]

I can guess that backing up this new site would be different. Its very changeability means the backup needs to be a daily thing right? I was just thinking a sort of collective CYA move in the highly unlikely possibility of someone with editing access having a mental aberration and deciding to go in there and remove or drastically alter a bunch of stuff (for whatever reason).
Another reason for that is if someone somehow accidentally made some huge cock-up and deleted something by mistake, would it be recoverable?

Yes, having a daily snapshot of the site would make it easier to roll back a day in case something broke or a lot of content got modified/deleted incorrectly. We could either just restore the entire previous backup (if these errors were the only important changes from the day), or install the backup someplace else and manually copy pages over. Once the busy development time is finished, there will probably be minimal changes on a day-to-day basis.

[shafer]

Will they have to re-bookmark and still be able to develop their page, or will they have pages in both places?

Oh, also, they won't need bookmarks at all. They can just browse through the site normally. Any pages that they have permission to edit, they just hit the edit button at the top. The same goes for moderators.

[Graeme Robson]

This sounds excellent!

[shafer]

It's 3:30am on a Friday night, so I should be going to bed soon... Hopefully sometime Saturday I'll invite all the moderators to create accounts on the new website, and then I'll manually give you all Manager permissions so you can edit things. Before that happens though, I've got a few loose ends to tie up, including backups and writing some useful instructions and pointers.

Oh, I added something exciting. All of the loach sites (forums, old, and new) now support Google Analytics, which provides all kinds of interesting statistics on our visitors. (What pages they visit, where they're from, what the most popular pages are, etc.) I've created a special account so moderators can see this information too. You'll get it later this weekend when you finally log in as managers in the new site and get to read the secret Moderator directory...

Also, I've been so busy on the technical side of things that I've spent zero hours working on a new skin for the site. So, it looks like a generic Plone site right now, albeit with great Loach content and beautiful fish photos. I haven't forgotten about Martin's Asia-themed prototype, but it'll take a nice quiet weekend of work to pull it off... It takes a while to grow the bamboo!

Jeff

[shari2]

Gee Jeff, I waited up till 1:45am, then had to hit the hay.
You are a wonderment, sorting out all the techie stuff this quickly!