Newnham Associates

The site now shows future and past events. All I’ve got to do now is to add the actual content, so there are some to show!

The main events page lets you choose whether you want to see future, past or all events: the default is future events. You can also see all events of a particular type: by clicking on the type of a specific event, you’ll see all events of that type. And from that page, you can then choose other types.  Hmm… there ought to be a way of going directly to that page, come to think of it.

But still, although there is probably plenty of fine tuning that could be done, the basics are well and truly in place now.

Forums and groups are now pretty much working. The way they fit together may not be entirely intuitive, but I’m not going to re-architect the whole buddypress / bbpress interface.

Basically, every forum topic is associated with a group. Any logged in member (ie, any logged in Associate) can see all topics associated with public groups, and can post to any of them. They can also start a new topic in any public group. If they’re not already a member of the relevant group, they’ll be enrolled automatically.

There’s one public group — Associates — that all Associates are automatically members of. I imagine that other groups might be started, for instance people interested in particular topics or events, but it’s equally possible that everything will be done under separate topics in the Associates group. It’ll be interesting to see how things work out.

As well as public groups, there are also private groups and hidden groups.

Private groups appear in the listing of groups, but if you’re not a member you can’t see the topics and you can’t post to them.

Hidden groups don’t even appear in the listing of groups. I don’t imagine hidden groups will be used much. There’s a separate group for the Committee, but I should think that it’ll be private, rather than hidden. Again, it’ll be interesting to see how things work out.

The Associates directory is now pretty much working. We’ve got a reasonable search function on it, contact forms for each Associate, and reasonable profile editing for the Associates.

Along the way I discovered what I think is a bug in the buddypress search, which has been pretty frustrating.

We now have working contact forms on the site.

One form will appear on each person’s profile, and will send an email to that person. And then there’s a generalised one, that will send an email to the secretary.

They are spam protected (akismet on the sender info, and reCAPTCHA widget on the form itself).

Next up: Do some work on the menu and navigation in general.

It’s difficult to work out the right combination of plugins, themes, etc.

Buddypress: big, complex, but will provide a real community feel for Associates. Will also provide a good basis (together with other plugins) for custom profile fields, a filtered list of associates, hiding some profile fields, etc. The disadvantage is that there are few themes that support it as-is. In particular, the theme I really like the look of, academica, doesn’t. But academica is proving a bit temperamental anyway, when it comes to developing a child theme. Trying to make it into a buddypress compatible theme is a big job, it seems, and not one I want to attempt.

So the functionality of buddypress is just too closely aligned to what I want to turn it down, so I’m going to stick with it. But the default theme, although basically pretty good, doesn’t have a good header – the menu isn’t very customisable. I guess I’m going to have to hand roll it, or look at other themes. There’s one that’s incredibly flexible and probably does everything, but that means it’s also pretty complex and possibly hard to set up out of the box. I need to look into it a bit more.

I also need a way of restricting access to some of the pages and parts of the site. s2membership is way overkill. role scope is probably overkill too. It looks like user access manager is the way to go.