building a true community of 200 sites

[Pardner Wynn]

I guess what's we're trying to do is figure out if Frontier can work 
for our application. But we do not expect an "out of the box" solution 
-- we assume we have to find someone to do some custom development.

So the "litmus test" we're putting before the experienced Frontier 
community is

              "can it* be implemented with say, less than 100 hours
               of custom development?"
                         * where "it" is shared-across sites
                           categorization of messages

Very hard to implement is okay, so long as it's simple and intuitive 
from the end-user's experience once the heavy lifting in setting it up 
is done.

Our view is, if it's 100 hours of development, that's an exceptional 
argument for using Frontier -- hey, where else could you get all the 
cool built-in features of Frontier PLUS this true community-ness for 
$900 plus the cost of 100 hrs of dev't?


Regards to all,
Pardner


On Saturday, February 15, 2003, at 10:56  AM, David A. Bayly wrote:

> 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.
>