A festive flurry of items to do with the Community Site for your perusal today. As detailed in our roadmap we have had some things planned for the Community Site. We've made some progress on most of the ones targeted from November to January, but some have (as expected!) had to slip a little.
We're going to cover the following items in this update:
- Glossary plugin
- One Blog
- Theming
- Tag Cloud
- Searching
Glossary Plugin
We'll start with the item that is actually live on the Community Site.
Mike Whitehead wrote us a Wordpress plugin for use on the Community Site, so that when you mouse-over certain words, a definition and some additional text appears. We've currently got a few defined, but we'll be adding more as we find them. It's currently only available on the main blog, though. If you find something in one of our Blog Posts that doesn't make much sense, why not post a comment or start a forum thread and we'll add them? Want to see a demo? Why not hover your mouse over this: EOD.
One Blog
Currently, we have several separate blogs on the Community Site, which means that navigation and data-sharing between them is not easy. What we plan to do (as is partially visible on http://community.beta.plus.net/) is to merge all the blogs into one, so that all the articles can take their place on the front page and navigation is possible between them easily. This should be a positive move for us, and the readers, as it means all the content is still visible, and everyone can see Dave's Traffic Management blog posts, or James' content on ADSL faults.
Theming
Again this is also partially visible on http://community.beta.plus.net/. We are planning a new theme to make things easier to navigate, brightening the colours and giving the site a face lift. Work on this has unfortunately been delayed, but our Design Ninjas are currently working on completing this at the moment.
Tag Cloud
Earlier this year we added Keywords to the
PlusNet Support pages to improve findability. We've now manipulated these keywords into a tag cloud, which is visible at http://community.beta.plus.net/support-page-tag-cloud/. Currently, it's based on the popularity of the data, but we hope to make this based on the number of clicks to specific keywords etc. in the future. We also hope to expand this to other areas of the site that use tags, meaning that you could click 'Broadband' and find all blog posts, forum posts and support pages relating to 'Broadband'.
Searching
One of the major problems with the forums is that searching doesn't work well. We have plans to replace this with our Google Mini box, and we've built a (completely un-styled) interface to this at http://community.beta.plus.net/google/. This gives you the opportunity of searching the forums, the blogs or both meaning that you can also find all material relating to a specific subject.
We will be progressing these items in the New Year with releases onto the live site through January and February.
