It’s all about Groups!

Slowly, we’re beginning to understand how/what/why telligent/community 5 Groups are meant to operate. This really comes from having executed some test migrations of live multi-level forums and blogs, we can see the GUI end-product and picture possible architectures.

Step back a second or two. From CS2008 we’ve understood the telligent/community platform as a collection of related applications – these are blogs | forums | media | wikis – within each we could have a single-app or multiple-apps. i.e. many Blogs, Forums, Media galleries and wikis.

The simplest application of a Group to an existing site to to position the Group at site route and man-handle* each application under that new parent group.

I meant, navigate the curious telligent menu systems, find your blog|forum|wiki and change the applications intended parent group.

Of course, that misses the opportunity to create and adapt new groups from your existing community content, creating Groups that genuinely reflect the related Blog and Forum content. Add in a Media Gallery (a wiki if you really insist) and you’ve created a micro-community within the overall community.

I’m still unsure about site navigation.

Group Navigation is by selecting a Group from a horizontal menu. Shown left this is the black-band of 5 or 6 group names – the non-displayed dropping into a drop-menu from a More … button.

Key to better user feedback may be the use of sub-groups which are displayed underneath the parent group. In our limited testing, we’ve noted that sub-group activity doesn’t get published upon the parent group – or at least – we’ve not found a hidden option to enable this feature.

One immediate omission is that sub-group activity isn’t displayed upon its parent activity. Thereby if you logically group a bunch of sub-groups together, the parent group looks like the Mary Celeste – sans activité.

Migrating CS2008.5 to CS five

We’ve completed a test migration of BioDieselNow.com to (a local) CS five with some interesting results. The migration creates (many) many groups of which these Groups adopt either Forum Groups (forums with sub-forums), Blogs and Wikis. Initial hands-on suggests that there’s a fairly detailed site reorganization immediately post-migration, moving lonely Blogs or Forum into new parent groups and trashing now superfluous groups.

I forecast a week or two of community users raising navigation issues – until they’ve learned new ways of navigation. Certainly a Favorite Places – a personal Ajax drop-down of regular community hang-outs - is a helper.

Where do our Google Adverts go?

Telligent don’t understand Google Adverts. However, many communities have little option than to monetize their site using an advert program. This requires that you’re able to place adverts consistently site-wide, usually with a mix of known – fixed - advert sizes.

Telligent/community 5 allows a user to customize page-layout and add various widgets into their community desktop. This is both a radical improvement and a challenge. We want to offer configurability but not at the expense of Advert revenue for our customers. We may have no option but to disable “Site – Customize Dashboard” rights until we know more.