I am currently building a simple static page blog with Jekyll. I am anticipating writing many posts and will have to develop a process for creating tags for this post.
This seems like a really inefficient and inaccurate way of categorizing the post as I can have two related topics but fail to give them the right keywords/tags consistently because of human error.
Is there a tool that exists already that can be given the html/markdown for a page and generate appropriate keywords/tags for it automatically? I'd like to automate these tasks as much as possible.
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I'm a front-end designer/developer whose weapon of choice for the back-end is WordPress. Up to this point all of my projects involving WordPress were fairly basic and it has handled everything beautifully. I just landed a new client that wants some extra functionality built into his next project and I'm hoping some of you WordPress wizards can give me some good advice while I'm putting together the quote.
I'm trying to limit the need for any subcontracting for the back-end functionality, so my question is whether or not WordPress can handle the following (via plugins or light custom manipulation):
The idea behind the site is to be a community calendar based on location that Health Care providers can log in and post their events to, as well as participate in discussions, blogs and all the other WordPress goodness. The specific functionalities that I'm unsure of the best way to accomplish are:
Full featured calendar that members with access can add their own events to - must be searchable by date/type of event/location etc
Event generator module for members that integrates with calendar - includes upload field for images and forms for details event info
Interactive map to filter both of the above by location (I'm assuming this will need to be flash, but I'd rather find another solution if possible)
I know there are other solutions out there that may be more suited to this than WordPress (Drupal, custom build, etc) but if it's at all possible to tackle this as a one man show then I'm going to charge it head-on!
Stack Overflowers and fellow WordPress fans...your insight would be much appreciated. Thanks in advance for your time.
This graph grants your experience with your weapon of choice, but the results are still clear. You can still tackle this as a 1 man show, it will just take a bit of a learning curve to conquer the fundamentals of a CMS more suited to the task at hand. I'm sure plenty of WordPress affecionados will come along and strangle my reputation, but I've worked with both and have found that in terms of flexibility, WordPress is not king, and for the custom coding you are going to have to do (hope you have some PHP?), I feel that you will find it easier to integrate with another platform. This task will be difficult if not impossible to accomplish without writing code, even if there is a set of plugins that appear on the face to match your needs perfectly.
But anyway, since you probably don't really care that much about my opinion, for WordPress, your plugin options look like..
Calendar - Events Calendar
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/events-calendar/
The screenshots don't look terribly promising though.
Most plugins I have found are geared toward being administered from the admin panel, it may be difficult to provide a user interface to such plugins, and it does not look like the event calendar is an exception. An experienced developer should be able to hook into the event publishing code with relative ease, but it could be a frustrating experience for the inexperienced.
For interactive maps, the Google Maps API is very feature rich, and you should be able to adapt it to your suit your mapping needs, regardless of platform.
If you want all of your providers to have their own blog, etc, what was once the WordPress MU plugin, but is now core-bundled WordPress MS (multisite) is what you need.
This again may also prove rigid, and you may encounter difficulty trying to bend the iron of WordPress enabling all your multisite users to be able to post to a common community site. I've only built 2 platforms with MU, so I'm not positive about this.
To unapologetically reiterate my first point, what would be light custom code may turn impossibly frustrating using WordPress.
I like WordPress, and choose it often for my clients. I have never extended it to suit a larger project.
If you do decide to use it, I look forward to hopefully helping you with any questions you may have along the way, feel free to ask.
I have a web site I'm building and the client wants to have features from vBulletin (blog, forums) integrated into the site. Its not enough to simply add the sites skin to vBulletin. Is there a way to do this?
I would expect there to be documentation on how, if it is possible, to do such a thing but haven't been able to find anything.
I'd rather not connect and query the vBulletin database directly.
There is no proper API for this yet, so you'd either have to rely on things like RSS, or query the database directly. RSS won't get you old data, nor any forum structures, etc. just basics of new data.
After much research (see: cursing) I've found that external.php and blog_external.php do what I want though not quite as elegantly as I would like.
So if you want to incorporate forum threads into your web page then external.php is what you need. It appears to be a bit more customizable in that you can have it output in JavaScript, XML, RSS, and RSS Enclosure (podcasting).
If you want to incorporate blog posts you appear to be limited to RSS only. Like I said, less than ideal but at least its something.
There is more information here: http://www.vbulletin.com/docs/html/vboptions_group_external
This is a question about the development workflow of front end engineers. I am starting a project for a rather large site with lots of pages, each page has multiple steps, and it's very difficult to lay out all the content in a spreadsheet.
The content of each page will be delivered in a spreadsheet cell, and some pages have multiple variable section that are determined by user's preferences.
I was asked my opinion about how to structure the deliverable. I am wondering if there is a best practice out there for structuring this kind of deliverable? Because when you have a poorly structured deliverable it can be almost as mindnumbing as using pen-and-pencil to write code.
Do you have any tools, formats, practices for creating deliverables that are easy to work with?
It sounds like you are just doing the UI design and then giving it to the front-end engineers.
If that is correct, I would suggest that you see if you can do the rough html/css work to get the page to look as you want, and then they can go in and give it the functionality, but that way you have an idea what is possible.
You can do much of the work, then leave comments about trying to center something a bit better, for example.
I am not a big fan of just getting the design on paper or as an image, it would be easier to just get the html/css.
There are plenty of tools now that make css and html easy to do, even if you have the css inside the html, they can separate the two, but, it would be a huge help to the designers.
Just do one page, and give it to them, and then come back in a day or two and get feedback as to what their thoughts are, and how you can improve what you give them.
As you go through this process, after a while both groups will know what to expect and you can get the rest done quickly.
This is more of an agile methodology with the front-end engineers as your customers.
My suggestion would be mockups or wireframes for the pages. Mockups would be examples of the pages in various states while the wireframe is a detailed document of the structure of the page.
HTML and CSS is way too complicated for mockup use. I usually first create a requirement backlog for UI/functionalities as well (just a list of priorized reqs in Excel).
Especially for a large site development you should also have the process and data flow definitions done (UML or other way of description) to help you define the mentioned requirements.
Based on these you will know what kind of steps does the whole site funcionality need (i.e. pages) and what the page hierarchy and structure will be like. This way it's much easier to get a grasp of the whole thing.
After that we'll create fast wireframes and visualize the end result with fast mockups done as images with Photoshop or similar. These are absolutely vital in my experience as it helps the customer (and other stakeholders) to actually understand what is beind done. For this the html and css are simply too slow to run multiple iterations with.
I am interested in choosing a good structure for an online message board-type application. I will use SO as an example, as I think it's an example that we are all familiar with, but my question is more general; it is about how to achieve the right balance between organization and flexibility in online message boards.
The questions page is a load of random stuff. It moves quickly (some might say, too quickly) and contains a huge number of questions that I'm not interested in.
The idea, I imagine, is that we can use tags to find questions that we're interested in. However, I'm not sure that this works: you can't use tags negatively. I'm not interested in PHP or perl or web development. I want to exclude such posts. But with the tags, I can't.
Although discrete subforums are in a sense less flexible, as they generally force you to pick a category even if a question might fit into two (if SO had, say, areas for "Web Development", "Games development", "Computer Science", "Systems Programming", "Databases", etc. then sure, some people might want to post about developing of web-based games, for example) is it worth sacrificing some of that flexibility in order to make it easier to find the content that you are interested in, and hide the content that you are not interested in?
Is there any way with a pure tagging system to achieve the greater ease of use that subforums provide?
The real problem with subforums comes when you guess wrong about which topics have enough interest to get their own subforums. While some topics end up with their own vibrant subcommunities others end up as empty ghettos, with little activity or feeling of community. Topics that might flourish as occasional subjects in a larger forum end up fragmented among many subforums, none of which has the critical mass of people necessary to have an active, vibrant community.
Though I think that tagging is supperior to grouping, people tend to think hierarchically.
In general it depends on the target group for the forum.
Maybe you can go with a mixture: use tagging and later use tag groups to order to posts. Delicious uses this, for example, and I find it rather helpful.
If you're worried about the divide between specific forums and open tag-based systems, like Stack Overflow, consider making a query system that allows you to do a bit more complex queries than just the AND operator, like here on Stack Overflow.
I cannot make a query here that will give me all questions in .NET, SQL or C#, combined, and that is the biggest irritation I have with the tags. With such a query system, you can create virtual forums at least.
Other than that, I don't really have a good opinion. I like both, and I haven't yet decided which one is best.
The idea, I imagine, is that we can use tags to find questions that we're interested in. However, I'm not sure that this works: you can't use tags negatively. I'm not interested in PHP or perl or web development. I want to exclude such posts. But with the tags, I can't.
While it's currently the case that you can't use tags to hide content, it shouldn't be impossible. Using SO as an example again, there's no reason that a system similar to the ignore function on a forum couldn't be made for the tag system. By adding a right-click context menu or a small "X" link somewhere in the tag display, tags could be marked as ignored. This would also allow the current tag feature to function; Seeing everything (minus your ignore list), or clicking a tag to see only questions with that tag.
Ignored tags could be managed in your profile if you should later develop an interest in PHP or INTERCAL that you lacked before.
The real question is that of performance. In my head it's as simple as replacing a SELECT [stuff] WHERE Tag = 'buffer-overflow' with SELECT [stuff] WHERE Tag NOT IN ('php','offtopic','funny-hat-friday') but I've not put together any DB backed sites that get absolutely pounded on by thousands people.
I'm looking for a presentation, PDF, blog post, or whitepaper discussing the technical details of how to filter down and display massive amounts of information for individual users in an intelligent (possibly machine learning) kind of way. I've had coworkers hear presentations on the Facebook news feed but I can't find anything published anywhere that goes into the dirty details. Searches seem to just turn up the controversy of the system. Maybe I'm not searching for the right keywords...
#AlexCuse I'm trying to build something similar to Facebook's system. I have large amounts of data and I need to filter it down to something manageable to present to the user. I cannot use another website due to the scale of what I've got to work at. Also I just want a technical discussion of how to implement it, not examples of people who have an implementation.
Are you looking for something along the lines of distributed pub/sub with content based filtering? If so, you may want to look into Siena and some of the associated papers such as Design and Evaluation of a Wide-Area Event Notification Service