Making the new website

This website is very much a work in progress.

I've set this forum hoping people will want to talk what things they want to the website to do that doesn't.

Things that they like, things that they don't.

Content that they should be added to the website.

How easy it is to use.

Questions about whether and how to do various things.

So please, give me lots of food for thought.

Yours for the forests.

Daniel

Discussions | login or register to post comments

Empathy

Mate, I'm with ya. Good to see you using open source software, as do we at www.yourdemocacy.net.au - Drupal no less.

So for now this is just good luck, and as our respective sites develop, I hope we can share Drupal code innovations and insights. I do a bit of checking out of other Drupal sites to see what they've done, as I'm sure do you.

To the forests, and to democracy.

www.yourdemocracy.net.au

By Hamish Alcorn at Tue, 2005-05-17 02:16 | login or register to post comments

pathways

hello beavs

<>looks great. i'm a bit braindead now though so i just spent 10 mins trying to fins this place to write my comments, of which there are few. i'm a bit confused about the difference between blog and forum. and discussions...

were you changing the forums in the last hour? I went to one place, took a phone clal, and then tried to find it again and it was all changed...you're playing tricks on me i think....

where can we have a chat online? is that blogging?

the history stuff is where my grant can fit in hey..?

I could probably write some of the history stuff anyway if you like.

By Claire Dunn at Fri, 2004-11-05 06:26 | login or register to post comments

blogs

Would love to tune into some recent NEFA work. Any ideas would be appreciated. Great to see NEFA still alive in 2005.

By toona at Thu, 2005-11-24 10:17 | login or register to post comments

blogs, chatting, discussions etc.

Hey Claire

I've disabled the online chatting function for the moment as it doesn't work in Internet Explorer, although it does work in Firefox.

I can reenable it if people are interested in using it???

The difference between blogging (Web Logging) and forums is that a blog is a web diary for an individual, or group of individuals who progressively add entries which are listed in chronological order.

A forum is a bit different, someone posts a question, or statement and people comment and comment on the comments etc.

For the moment we're just using forums on the nefa site not blogs (I'm getting around to removing that link at the top) but we might enable people to have blogs later on.

"Discussions" is a category I've created for sorting the content on the site. Other categories include: Blockading guide, News, Images, Ecology, and History. The categories are one way of navigating around the site. They all come up in a navigation tree when you "click for menu" (top left).

Would love for you to write some content, history or current activities would be great.

By daniel.beaver at Tue, 2004-11-09 02:02 | login or register to post comments

Attaching articles, photos and other stuff

So, if I wanted to put an interesting article on the website, say, under the history forum, or stick some photos on, how would I do that? I mean, I could write it out again, but thats not exactly the most efficient way of doing it, and that doesn't help when it comes to photos and maps.

By Nick McClean at Fri, 2004-11-05 05:00 | login or register to post comments

Testing the limits of fantastic new site.

Daniel,

This is fantastic work well done. I didn't realise you were so advanced in your progress. Thank you for all this good work. I have been suffering low level anxiety in the knowledge that I have been neglecting to get this done for so long.

I have a few comments re style, structure and functionality;

Style

I like the style of the site you have set up it is clean and clear - elegant in its simplicity.

Structure

I am unsure what the functional difference is between Blogs and Forums in this situation. I wonder if we really need blogs? Wouldn't forums do the job and be more topic focused as opposed to personality focused? Is this a feature of Drupal that we can't turn off?

Image galleries can be filled up considerably as I have XX MB of graphics from all over the shop and can send you CD of same if you like. Is there a simple way to upload directories full of images in Drupal?

By soshan at Tue, 2004-11-02 00:57 | login or register to post comments

Directory Upload of Images

Drupal does have a directory upload feature, but you have to ftp all the images to the server first.

<>Sean I have made you a folder on the server called seans_images and I will send you the ftp username and password so you can upload them.<>

Then to get them into the drupal database you go to administer > images and choose either fast or slow directory upload.

I suggest practicing with a small number of images because when I've done it, it has been a bit buggy (although I have only tried using directory upload fast, so it would be good to give slow a go). I found that directory upload fast didn't work when I added the trailing slash for the directory as it says that you must!

Also I'm a bit unhappy with the way the image galleries link displays. I'm keen to restrict image uploads to the images category but the image galleries displays galleries for all terms in the vocabulary assigned to the images module. (vocabulary is a bit of drupal jargon and basically stands for a system of categories for navigating the site, you can have more than one eg you could categorise by topic in one vocabulary and by region in another)

However because I'm only putting images in the images category all the other categories have no images but are still displayed.

There are two potential solutions that I can see:

1. Alter the php code so that only the term images and its child terms are displayed.

2. Set up another vocabulary called images.

The first is a bit beyond me at the moment but I think is a much better solution in terms of the longer term simplicity of the site. So maybe we should just wear the undesireable for now (although the decision probably should be made now as drupal doesn't seem to be a way to move a term from one vocabulary to another, so the more images uploaded the more stuck with whatever choice we make we will be.)

Hmm this is definitely an important thing to know how to do. Should figure out a way for people without ftp access to do.

By daniel.beaver at Wed, 2004-11-03 02:11 | login or register to post comments

Blogs v Forums

It is very easy to turn Blogs off.

All we would have to do is turn the Blogs module off in administration > modules.

Probably this is a good idea to make things a little bit simpler to start off with.

I was thinking the Blogs might make it easier to deal with miscelleneous, more personal content that might be hard to categorise and as a bit of a service to provide people.

But I guess we can have a miscellaneous category or something.

As a temporary solution I've turned blogs off and created a blogs usergroup which will enable me to give people a blog on request.

By daniel.beaver at Wed, 2004-11-03 00:58 | login or register to post comments

More comments on Brilliant new site

I would also suggest that we rename "media releases to "NEWS" and "direct action guide" to "Act Now" or just "Action Guide" or something else that invites action and list there the actions that we want the general public to take to help the campaign as per the old "Lobby a Pollie" page. I am a bit lost in some of the subcategories at the moment and am not sure if they are to numerous and specific or to few and broad but I don't think that they are final either way.

I really don't have time to go any further into this right now but I will give it more thought and be back here wheen I can give a more considered response.

By soshan at Tue, 2004-11-02 01:49 | login or register to post comments

Content Suggestions

Well, the fauna profiles are really great, especially for non-science trained people like myself who want to soak up lots of ecological background type info, but don't know how to go about it all.

And lots of maps are always a good idea, plus maybe some (accurate) directions to some really nice bits of forest, maybe with some site specific info regarding ecology, history, etc. where possible.

Say, for example, you might give directions to the old-growth areas in Chaelundi that were the scene of the 1991 blockades, with info about the legal processes that were instigated as a result, a link to the report about its hollow-bearing trees/arboreal mammals, some good, but still accessible ecological info about forest types, geology maybe, the history of the area as well as how this particular place fits into the history of the forest debate and NEFA, as it was by all accounts a pretty important episode, then link it up with some nice pictures.

A fair job, but useful as an educational resource, especially for those for whom NEFA is a bit of a hazy mysterious entity that they would like to know more about and its also a good way to give people the opportunity to see the results of activism in a tranquil bush setting.

By Nick McClean at Mon, 2004-11-01 06:38 | login or register to post comments

Making forums

I can't seem to work out how to make a forum and have it come up on the forums list. Why not?????

By Nick McClean at Mon, 2004-11-01 05:57 | login or register to post comments

Making Forums

You have to pick one of the catagories from the list under NEFA when you're filling out the create forum form. Otherwise it doesn't get published anywhere... I think.

Unfortunately it doesn't really specify this in the form so need to alert people to the importance of this as it probably applies to all types of content.

By daniel.beaver at Mon, 2004-11-01 06:14 | login or register to post comments