building a true community of 200 sites

[David A. Bayly]

I understand your need to do "categorisation" of messages/stories and 
I know how to do it and search using the category values, but only 
in one website. That's  what the metadata plugin allows you to do 
very effectively.

But I don't know how to do it easily in several hundred websites. By 
easily, I mean in a way that a relative newbie could administer and 
novices could use in their individual websites.

I can devise solutions but they don't pass the easy to administer test



>David,
>
>That was a very helpful response. Thank you! And that's great news 
>about the shared member list.
>
>As far as handling specific message types like Recipes,  I don't 
>know for a fact they will actually want recipes per se, but they do 
>need certain pages on their sites devoted to certain different 
>categories of information, and the information on those pages needs 
>to be tagged in the dbase as having a certain context (eg, "this is 
>something called a 'recipe', not a 'news' story).
>
>So let's say
>a) it's a page on their site where all the messages attached to that 
>page are "recipes"
>and
>b) there's another page where all the messages attached are 
>"community service work projects" (as in "we're cleaning Smith park 
>up on Saturday, Please come and we're supplying free fried chicken 
>for volunteers")
>
>I'm pretty sure Frontier can let us set that up from a UI point of 
>view. But we need the messages on certain pages "tagged" as 
>belonging to different categories and filed on the correct page for 
>that category.
>
>1) There needs to be a way to search for "fried chicken" in the 
>category "recipe" so, for example, you do NOT find the example (b) 
>above where it contains the text 'fried chicken' but the context is 
>not a recipe, but merely the fact someone's bringing chicken to a 
>work party.
>
>2) There needs to be a mechanism so a user can browse and search ALL 
>the recipes, or a better example is, you have nothing to do on 
>Saturday so you want to know if ANY of the 200 churches is having 
>some sort of a work party this Saturday.
>
>If you have any thoughts, please let me know!
>
>Regards,
>Pardner
>
>>>  3) They want to be able to create certain shared info. The simplest
>>>  example would be Recipes. Each church would post "their own" page with
>>>  their favorite recipes. But they'd also like to have a button that says
>>>  "show me ALL the recipes for ALL the churches."
>>
>>That's possible, but involves considering some design questions 
>>before setting it up.
>>
>>What is the difference between a normal message in a DG, and a 
>>recipe?  Is it that you will adopt a convention that says the 
>>message subject will contain Recipe? If the answer is  yes then a 
>>variant of the search engine will handle do what you want. If not, 
>>your solution will have to deal with multiple websites and that's a 
>>complication.
>>
>>Or, you could make a single website that only contains recipes, and 
>>since you have shared membership  login is not an issue. Knowing 
>>that only recipes posted in that recipe website might make things 
>>too user unfriendly.
>>
>>One tool that does handle structured stories like recipes nicely is 
>>the metadata plugin,  but it works on individual website basis. .


-- 

- David Bayly.       Programmer and digest reader.     dbayly at udena dot ch
  		Digest Readers do it once a day.