CMS/Blog/Gallery Thoughts

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ZippySLC

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I know there's been tons of discussion on how we want xenForo to have a CMS, blogging, and gallery function. My suggestion is, don't.

Wordpress, Drupal/Joomla, and Menalto Gallery are all fine pieces of software. Rather than having forum developers try to build some sort of CMS, I'd like to see the development team focus on the forum software and instead just write some form of bridge into some selected CMS/Blog/Gallery software. That way we can leverage the very experienced developers of those products and keep the focus on the forum software with our dev team.
 
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I really don't get why people don't feel they need a CMS.

What does your forum community do ? Just blab on about whatever ? Your community doesn't even have some summative information that could be put in an article ? Good articles are great for SEO and for search engines to find you. You don't even care about that.

DoctorWatsOn said:
I like WordPress but I haven't been able to get the WP/xF bridge working
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How so ?
 
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Digital Doctor said:
How so ?
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I posted about the problems I had on the WP bridge thread weeks ago, but sadly no solutions were forthcoming and it seems I am not the only one having similar problems.

Not that I am complaining, xFrocks has done a great job, which seems to work for most, if not all, and I don’t expect ‘full-on’ support for a free mod.

That’s why I have this afternoon purchased a licence for Contentteller, because it’s a commercial option that is designed to be integrated with xF and comes with support, which for a novice like me is worth the investment.
 
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Digital Doctor said:
Smart Move.
Contentteller has some advanced features which show they are forward looking people. :)
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I think it was smart, just got in on their 1/2 half price Christmas sale, so it was only £50.
cool.png
 
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DoctorWatsOn said:
I know nothing about Joomla, I like WordPress but I haven't been able to get the WP/xF bridge working, so I started playing with Contentteller CMS a couple of days ago, which is professionally integrated with xenForo and I've got to say as a fairly inexperienced person I am liking it so much that I think I am going to grab a licence in their 1/2 price Christmas sale that ends today. It seems to offer what I was expecting from vB CMS, and what a disappointment that turned out to be.

You maybe interested in looking at this thread: Help to test my Contentteller CMS bridged xenForo install.
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there is a christmass sale going on? :O
 
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tafreehm said:
what do u want? lol
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I don't want that many things, just very specific things. I am asking the questions one at a time over on their forum. This software I already know is going to be very much overkill for what I need but that's ok. Everyone does not want to same thing.

If my list gets all positive responses than it wil work for me. The first question was not a deal breaker. The rest will be but it has been all positive so far.

I have found out when I do a question dump half the question get missed so that is why the questions one by one.
 
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I found out xenforo couple of days ago, and it got everything that i want in my current vb forum.
However, it still missing some basic features, like poll, animated avatars, custom profile field.. But it is understandable because this is still in beta.
And, I am pretty sure, they will bring all necessary features and we will get useful plugins and hacks by others.
 
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Contentteller finally said no to one of my requirements.

It looks like I might be shelling out for a complete custom job. What I want is actually not near as bit as what others are doing, they are just shooting around the features I want.
 
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I think having a Gallery is more important than a CMS or Blog, its common knowledge that almost every forum these days allows you to upload your own images to your own space, without this I know for a fact on most larger forums that utilise galleries the members would be unhappy about it.
 
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Obviously, the forum is the main concern, as I continually worry that it's going to end up becoming too bulky and losing sight of the initial formula of taking what isn't needed and cleaning it all up from scratch. That said, despite my lack of need for a XF CMS (I have no interest in using anything other than Wordpress, so anything less than a bridge for XF means nothing to me) and a XF blog (I don't understand the need for them), the gallery idea not only should be implemented, but also given the XF revisionist treatment.

There's something about how forums (vB and IPB) use galleries that is a little too add-on-ish and unnecessary. I don't think that forums need a Facebook or Flickr-style gallery because we already have Facebook and Flickr for those jobs. But there could be a way to make a gallery integrated naturally into, say, a user's profile where any picture attached to a post gets automatically associated with their profile (with a link back to the post, for sake of context), maybe an avatar-specific folder for a user's history of avatars or profile photos, and so forth. Basically, there needs to be a way for the gallery to just be a part of the forum experience on a natural and simple level, rather than a clunky addition that seems like it's just been tacked onto the end of the forum software as a second thought. I'm sure that others would be more visionary than I, but that's my two cents on it.
 
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tafreehm said:
However, it still missing some basic features, like poll, animated avatars, custom profile field
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I think xenforo has Polls.
Mike said:
Well, there's already a gender field and a free form location field, so that does a couple things that you want, though it may not be in the format you want.
There are plans for custom profile fields, yes, though I don't know the form they're going to take yet.
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They are coming ... but for the people that need them ... they need them right out of the box.
 
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CMS and Blogs already have other fully mature solutions for them (wordpress with multi-blogging turned on takes care of both at one shot), as can Joomla! and Drupal etc.

But a gallery is a more fundamental part of the system. It should NOT **NOT** be implemented as a separate component that is only tangentially integrated into the forums. PICTURES AND VIDEO are a huge part of the online conversation today, and as such they really should be fully integrated INTO the forum system that exists to facilitate those conversations. You want uploading and reusing images to be a seamless experience. Members should be able to re-use their uploads, and other members should be able to search for images by categories/description/tags. They should be able to tag sections of images (like flicker notes) so that they can call out the part of an image they want to talk about.

I've spent years looking at the way galleries are currently implemented in community software, and haven't found anything that is really effective yet. I personally feel that XF has a real opportunity to totally rewrite the standards in image/video/file <-> forum integration the way they have re-invented much of the forum interaction itself. I think there is a LOT more room for improvement in implenting xfGallery than there is in implementing xfCMS or xfBlog.

::tosses 2 shiny coins in hat::
 
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Tigratrus said:
But a gallery is a more fundamental part of the system. It should NOT **NOT** be implemented as a separate component that is only tangentially integrated into the forums. PICTURES AND VIDEO are a huge part of the online conversation today, and as such they really should be fully integrated INTO the forum system that exists to facilitate those conversations. You want uploading and reusing images to be a seamless experience. Members should be able to re-use their uploads, and other members should be able to search for images by categories/description/tags. They should be able to tag sections of images (like flicker notes) so that they can call out the part of an image they want to talk about.
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Very well put!
 
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Did vOldForum ever have a Gallery where Images attached to Posts also ended up in the Gallery ?
Would that be duplicate content according to Google Search engines ?
Is this a good or bad thing ?
Should I have my own Gallery of the images I attach to posts ?

Tigratrus said:
PICTURES AND VIDEO are a huge part of the online conversation today, and as such they really should be fully integrated INTO the forum system that exists to facilitate those conversations.
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Indeed. A picture is worth 1000 words. Not sure how many words google search thinks they are but ...

You want uploading and reusing images to be a seamless experience.
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Yep. Seamless depends on what you want accomplished though.
Members should be able to re-use their uploads, and other members should be able to search for images by categories/description/tags.
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I'd happily add some keywords when uploading images. Maybe admins could add image tags. Maybe users could add tags, so they could find that image for themselves ? I'm wondering how much people would use it.

They should be able to tag sections of images (like flicker notes) so that they can call out the part of an image they want to talk about.
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That sounds advanced. Maybe you should be able to make new images out of existing images easily ? Add the image, but crop it easily, and save the cropped one ?

I've spent years looking at the way galleries are currently implemented in community software, and haven't found anything that is really effective yet.
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I've seen a few bad ones lately ... vB4 asset manager ! (ouch).

Tigratrus, make sure you bring up all these ideas in the Galleria thread

http://xenforo.com/community/threads/galleria-the-basics.9504/
 
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Actually the tagging parts of images isn't as hard as you think. Basically you just store sets of coordinates in a Database and it uses that to show just part of the image where you need to show just that bit. We actually have a system that does that now in our existing vB forum, and that's my basic understanding of how it works.

Google LOVES images that have info associated with them, we get a substantial amount of traffic from Google Images.
 
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I'm not sure if this has been done before but I think allowing Real Text Names might help.
Forinstance .... Let's say you ran a Car Forum about Preludes.
I'd expect some people would like to insert the following.
Code: 
[galleria]prelude.2001.SE[/galleria]
[galleria]prelude.2001.SE.specs[/galleria]
[galleria]prelude.2001.example1[/galleria]
[galleria]prelude.2001.example2[/galleria]
[galleria]prelude.1999.SE.specs[/galleria]
The idea would be that key images could be given systematic names. These could be learned over time.
Or for Xenforo ...
Code: 
[galleria]admin.panel.users[/galleria]
[galleria]admin.panel.banned.users[/galleria]
[galleria]admin.panel.forum.moderation[/galleria]
[galleria]admin.panel.registration.options[/galleria]
Maybe this would be too hard to remember.

Thus a killer search function would surely help !!
The idea would be you want to insert something you know is there.
Just type in the keywords / Tags you think will bring up what you want.
Hover over results for preview.
Click the Image to insert it.

Does that work ?

xenforo.insert.gallery.image.via.name.or.keywords.webp
 
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Tigratrus said:
Google LOVES images that have info associated with them, we get a substantial amount of traffic from Google Images.
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Could you please go into detail about what kind info you associate with pictures in your gallery? All the pictures I upload to my gallery all contain a descriptive name eg (2010_Mini_Cooper.jpg), but google does not seem to really care. Thanks.
 
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