customize discussion groups?

[Ken Dow]

Hi Bruce,

> I have a client that wants to allow persons to post to news items, 
> etc. without being a member.

This is really swimming upstream, IMO. If you want visitors to add 
content you should consider the CommentIt plug-in instead.

	http://www.baylys.com:8080/manila/plugins/commentIt

> I have suggested this might be problematic.  His response is that the 
> interface is very un intuitive. If you are not a member, there is no 
> dialog presented that says - "sign up now so you can post a response 
> now that you have hit the "discuss link" and find there is nothing to 
> discuss and no instructions on what to do".

This is a bit easier since you can configure the discussion group such 
that it's not open to visitors and then add the requisite 
link/explanation to your template.

> I have looked all about and found only one piece of info re: 
> customizing discussion groups and it is very old. Which brings me to 
> my second issue, generally speaking, as a newbie, I am having a hard 
> time discerning the direct relevance of the older postings to version 
> 9.

No easy answer here.

> Second, is there a comprehensive set of current documentation for 
> persons who have not "grown up" with the product?   Or in the 
> alternative, perhaps an index, preferably one that was relevant only 
> to the current version?

I believe this is what UserLand is attempting here:

	http://frontier.userland.com/usersGuide

> And while I am thinking about it, what about a comprehensive sysadmin 
> document - something that tells us what we need to do to ensure the 
> safety of our clients' data - how to recover from errors - rebuild 
> indexes (are there indexes?) - "pack" tables - all that sort of stuff 
> that would help us sleep better?

No such animal. I offer a Manila Server Administration course from time 
to time:

	http://www.kendow.com/manilaserveradministration.html

I plan to make it available online but it'll be well into next year 
before I have time.

> And are there any stats on performance - how many manila sites per 
> server before performance starts to drag -

This is tricky. There are many variables: static site serving, static 
pictures, gems, plug-ins, templates, home page caching, logging. Hard 
to give a cookbook formula.

> how effective is using a second server to store picture and gems in 
> increasing performance?

Very. Static serving of pictures and gems is a great way to improve 
performance. On OS X you can use the built-in Apache server without 
adding a second box.

> Oh, and is there a macro that will parse the list of sites by date 
> that would make it easy to determine when a "first month is free" site 
> is up for renewal?

Not that I'm aware but it should be straightforward to adapt this one:

	http://macros.userland.com/hostingSuite/listSites

HTH.

--
Ken

Learn about Frontier, Manila & Radio Userland
http://www.kendow.com/courses.html

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