Reply To: Dedicated JoCo Cruise Crazy Shadow Cruise website
Hey guys, you’re right! THO is 5 people. Number who actually deal with the servers and the code that runs on them is 1.
This is an idea that has been on our minds for some time now. Perhaps this a good place to start a discussion about it. I understand the impatience to get a better solution running. For the below (and other, I’m sure) reasons, this is something the home office would like to help with and get Sea Monkey buy in on.
- Have it on the jococruisecrazy.com domain as an official jccc site
- Having shadow cruise surveys etc integrated with the user account system allows us to correlate submitted data with bookings easily, which saves time and increases awesome
- We want to have it on our server so that we can (a) pay for it (b) scale it up if need be (c) improve it to integrate it more with cruise booking stuff
THE GENERAL PLAN AS FAR AS I KNOW WHAT IT IS RIGHT NOW
Please let me know what you think about this. I’ll be having a meeting with the other organizers this week and we’ll be talking more about the future of the site. I will bring in notes from this conversation. We know this is a feature you guys really want and we’d like to launch the site with the booking engine this year… and we’d like help from the community to build it out and find out how it should be set up.
Umbrella install: wordpress multisite. Booking engine is one of the sites, user account system perhaps a separate site…TBD. Perhaps the main blog is one of the sites (if not this year, then next year). Forums is another site.
- Forums via buddypress? or some other system
- Separate wiki either via mediawiki (with http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:WPMW) or http://wordpress.org/plugins/wordpress-wiki-plugin/
- Admins for each of the separate sites so that the forums can be sea monkey controlled
Below are some notes about our thought process. Please let me know what you think.
Why wordpress? A marriage of convenience. Tons of plugins and every band runs on wordpress already, so it happens to be where I am comfortable working.
Why multisite? Well, this is something that just occurred to me today, realizing that sea monkeys should have control of their forums but need shared logins and the benefits of a user account system. Multisite seems like the easiest way to accomplish that. I actually have never worked with multisite before so it would be a learning curve for me, but it seems like it would be worth it.
Why separate forums? We’ve heard conflicting feelings on this move. The feelings seem to fall into two camps: 1) the JoCo forums are being spammed by JCCC garbage! and 2) the JoCo forums will wither away without the JCCC people in it!
In the end, we’d like to have separate JCCC forums so that each group can have their fullest chances to blossom as individuals, as it were. Yes there is a little risk in this, but we think it’s the cleanest solution and will allow both discussions to be better.
Should the wiki be separate? Our gut feeling right now is: yes. But we don’t use it as much as the sea monkeys. What do you guys think?
Who will be the admins? Who will set up the site? That’s the nice thing about multi site. It should be the sort of thing where we can set up the basics and then let some admins and coders you guys choose in to make further modifications. You guys know what you want better than we do. Since the forums, wiki, etc are the online home of the Sea Monkeys, this is a place where we’d love your help and input to make it into what it needs to be.
WHEN? JUST TELL ME WHEN. Well, soon. Our meeting is tomorrow. Might be able to get a multi-site instance up by sometime next week or maybe a bit later. We could let in admins by the end of the month, presumably. The shadow cruise site could have its own theme and own set of plugins. Apart from buying the plugins and handing over the keys, we’re sure you guys would do a better job than us. How does this sound? I know it’s not right away, but I think the benefits of having all this stuff together would be pretty huge for you guys etc.
Anyway, this discussion topic was so on the nose for what we’ve been wanting to talk with you guys about I felt I had to chime in. Very curious to hear your thoughts on a) the general direction and b) those moderators and admins and coders and designers who would want to help.
Finally, if any of you are wordpress experts your input is VERY welcome.