As I said in my comments earlier, I’ve tweaked the sidebar and categories / projects setup of the blog a bit so as to show how (I think) we might be able to make use of our new group community for regular blogging (à la BookLikes) AND reading games / group reads etc. Here are the basic new features I added:
1. “Member Feeds” Menu
I’ve added a menu that brings together our individual member feeds, culled from our respective “regular” posts.
(For the time being, it’s located between the “General Site Links” and “Bingo Pages” menus — placing of this, as well as any and all other sidebar items is, of course, subject to discussion / comments / change.)
This menu draws on the member name categories; in that respect, it does the exact same thing as the WP-auto-generated “categories” menu further below. BUT it ONLY draws on the member name categories, not on any additional categories (e.g., Halloween Bingo). So this would be the place where we could find every site member’s individual posts, in one feed per member — exactly the way our individual blogs used to work on BookLikes.
Right now, with only a few of us, this menu doesn’t take a lot of space; on the “actual” site, with more members, we’d probably eventually have to either design this as an “overflow” menu in the style of the “Book Reviews / Blog Posts by Author” menu (and corresponding menus for movie and music blog posts / reviews) towards the bottom of the sidebar of my blog … or as a drop-down menu if we can figure out how to code it as such (* whistles innocently and looks at MbD *).
Please note that I’ve left the original (WP / auto-generated) “Categories” menu item in place (though moved a bit further down, between “Recent Comments” and “Archives”), but I’ve turned this item into a drop-down menu using the handy formatting option that WP provides for its auto-generated “Categories” menu. I’ve done this because we now have two different types of post categories — one to select / cull member post feeds by name, one to select / cull by reading games or similar “special purposes” (e.g., Halloween Bingo, see below) — and the auto-generated “Categories” menu item as provided by WP doesn’t allow for that distinction; we have to make it ourselves (and can easily do so, as hopefully shown in my example).
Also, if members want to create individual “About Me” pages, they can of course do so, too:
(a) Either by using the “page” formatting option; in this instance I suggest creating a separate menu collecting those pages similar to the currently-existing “Bingo Pages” menu. (Theoretically we could include those pages as separate, possibly nested items in the “Member Feeds” menu, but IMHO that would make it too convoluted.) Note that every newly-created “About Me” page would have to be added to the menu manually by site admin, as pages are the only type of WP contents format that can’t be categorized or tagged and doesn’t show in any type of feed, so there is no way of summarily capturing all pages of a certain type / contents and then just linking to the place where they are all collected.
(b) Or by formatting members’ “About Me” sections as either a project or a post (for feed culling purposes across the site, it would have to be unanimously one of the two formats; using both would mean we’d necessarily only capture one of the two formats in the “About Me Sections” feed). We could then cull all of these projects / posts in a separate feed that could be summarily linked from the sidebar menu, the same way our member feeds and the special purpose feeds are (e.g., Halloween Bingo, see below).
2. Halloween Bingo Test Menu
I’ve created a test menu (below the “Bingo Pages” menu) designed to bring together essentially all types of (in this instance) Halloween Bingo-related content. (Obviously, we could do the same thing for any other type of “special interest” posting — Festive Tasks, group reads, etc.) This menu consists of three basic types of contents (two of these, with sub-items):
(a) The Halloween Bingo admin posts formatted as projects. and checked off as “Project Type: Halloween Bingo” in the relevant box to the right of the project drafting field.
I’ve created a “Questions?” project post to show what this separate feed would look like; as MbD had already created another “project” and categorized it as “Halloween Bingo” we now actually have a genuine test feed there.
Immediately below this main menu item, as separately-listed sub-items, there are two examples of major admin pages, plus another — individual — link to the new “Questions?” project post, (1) to show how a project can be made visible individually (next to other menus items) as well as in the context of a feed, and (2) because arguably the “Questions?” post should be easily accessible from the sidebar menu in addition to its inclusion in the overall Halloween Bingo admin feed. Again, note that pages are the only type of WP posting formats that don’t show up in any feed, so these *need* to be included in a sidebar menu if we want to make them visible and easily accessible to everybody. (I therefore suggest not actually using the word “Feed” in the first line of the “actual” menu on our new permanent site, i.e. the line designing the overall admin section in that menu; I’ve just used it in the test menu to show that this particular menu item draws on the admin “project” posts feed.)
(b) The Halloween Bingo players feed.
These are the game participants’ regular posts, culled from the newly-created “Halloween Bingo” category.
Taking my two test posts — and this present post — as examples, you will see that you’ll find these three posts both in my “regular” member thread (see “Member Feeds” menu, above) AND in the topical “Halloween Bingo” feed: all I had to do to achieve this was check both my member name and “Halloween Bingo” in the “Categories” box to the right side of the post drafting field. No duplication of posts or anything else necessary; WP does the sorting for us.
So, if we use the “projects” format (in connection with a “Project Type” named accordingly, e.g., “Halloween Bingo”, “Festive Tasks”, etc.) for admin purposes and just add the relevant topical categories (again, Halloween Bingo, Festive Tasks, etc.) to WP’s “Categories” feature for regular posts, we can have separate feeds for both — PLUS a menu bringing both the admin feed and the players’ regular posts together in the sidebar.
(c) Individual Halloween Bingo pages / master update posts, regardless in which format.
Many of us like to create master update posts / pages for their individual game, and it is easy enough to include those, too, in the sidebar menu for accessibility. For purposes of creating these types of posts, it doesn’t matter in what format they come (posts / pages / projects). If they are designed as pages, however, we would have to know their title so as to be able to identify them when creating this menu entry. (Again, we would have to do this manually if everybody uses the “page” format.) If we could get players to use a general “Halloween Bingo Master Update Posts” tag, though (or a category — though in this instance, for site organization purposes I’d prefer a tag), we could, again, create a separate feed culling all of these posts into one place and, again, just basically link to that feed in the sidebar menu.
A note on visibility: WP allows sidebar items (menus, etc.) to be restricted in visibility. Thus, for 10 of the 12 months of the year, the “Halloween Bingo” menu need not appear on the overall sidebar at all (ditto Festive Tasks, etc.) — we would restrict visibility to the associated contents and only restore the menu to “general” visibility while the game is actually being run.
Final note: I’ve taken the liberty of moving the search bar further up in the sidebar menu (below “General Site Links”); it seemed a bit buried, being stuck in the middle. But as with the placing of all menu items, this is just me — I’ll happily bow to majority preferences if those should be otherwise!
This all looks really great, T-A and I think that the work you’ve done here is amazing. I had no idea that you could create menus using only specific categories. I still don’t really get “projects” since I’ve never used them before – my free wordpress sites don’t have them (I just looked).
One thing that I am wondering, since we don’t want the sidebar to become so overwhelmed with menus that it is unusable, is if we really need a “Member Feed” menu, since it’s possible to click on the individual name at the bottom of any past and get an feed of only that person’s posts. If we bring 40 people over here, that’s a lot of names in the menu. I don’t know – just a thought.
I LOVE the game specific menus and think that those are completely brilliant.
With respect to the “About Me” pages idea, I’m wondering if we would want to create a “Member Bios” page that we could have as part of the top menu, where we solicit a paragraph or so from each person and create one informational page with all of the information. The page could also provide a link to our members individual blogs, if they have them. We could set it up alphabetically, with jump points, so things are easy to find. Alternatively, we could do a page per person, but have a navigation page (titled About Our Contributors) that contains nothing but member names linked to their About Me page, with a link to that navigation page on the topline menu. That would require two clicks to get to the person you’re looking for, but it would also keep the sidebar from getting overwhelmed (a drop down menu would also potentially do this, but I have no idea how to do drop down menus).
I have many more questions about projects, but I think that I will do a little bit of trying to figure stuff out and then come back with questions.
I have absolutely no issues with doing away with any and all types of “Member Feeds” menu and pulling the member feeds solely from the “author” name in the footer. I created this menu just (1) because we already had the “category” menu setup for member post feeds and I wanted to preserve it in the context of my additions and (2) to show how categories can be used to put posts into different feeds, depending on how you categorize them and then put together the corresponding menu(s).
As I said in my post, I, too, see a “space” issue if we do this for 40+ people without any sort of economical display. My solution on my blog are “overflow” menus (i.e., basically menus that show just the first couple of items and have a scroll bar at the right side that allows you to scroll down all the way to the end — this way, my “overflow” menus can literally comprise hundreds of items). The alternative are drop-down menus … which I, cough, ought to know how to code (meaning that I was taught eons ago but never really got around to trying, because this tends to be one of the features you find already pre-configured pretty much everywhere you turn, so I’ve basically always been too lazy to do this on my own) … and which, remembering the “report your points” form we used in 2019 iteration of Festive Tasks, I am pretty confident MbD actually does know how to code. (Double cough.)
Obviously these comments apply to a member “About Me” pages menu in equal measure — IF these are created as “pages” (and thus would NEED to be shown as individual index / menu items somewhere). I think your idea of a member “About Me” pages master index (linked from the top bar menu) might be similar to my blog’s Literature master index (to which I’m also linking in the top bar menu): https://themisathena.info/literature
The downside of this — and incidentally also a summary “About Our Members” master page with mini-bios all in one place — is that it has to be created and curated manually, which, speaking from experience, can be quite a lot of work as time goes on. That’s why I had the idea of getting our members to create their “about me” entries as either “projects” or ordinary blog posts (either one format or the other used uniformally, but not both), with a specific “About Me Page” tag: that would allow us to cull them all in one place — a feed created on the basis of that tag, the same way the “Halloween Bingo” feed is culled from the posts in the “Halloween Bingo” category. Any and all new “About Me” posts tagged accordingly would then automatically be added to that feed, and everybody would have the ability to create their “About Me” section any which way they like. I realize this might make for a long feed if people create very large “About Me” posts / pages, but if we tell them to keep things to a couple of paragraphs, it should be manageable … I hope?
MbD knows how to code the drop down menu, but I think the only way I can do it here on WP is by actually editing the theme files. And that’s doable but a rather large project, because I’d have to create a child-theme, and then hunt down the obscure location, buried in multiple files and thousands of lines of script, of the code for the menus – for the sidebar – are located, and then edit them.
I’m not unwilling, but given the time constraints we’re giving ourselves, we might be better off waiting on that until the more pressing details are in place.
Fine, absolutely! I was thinking of a “custom HTML” type sidebar item anyway — it’s what I’d be using to create an overflow menu box as well. We can definitely go with that to start with. (At least this makes me feel better about not trying to go near dropdown menus myself …) And there I was thinking we could just basically use a “form” setup similar to the one we used for the selection of the individual holidays in the Festive Tasks “report your points” feature …!
Oh! I forgot about the custom HTML option in the menus. (I hate the menu function here; it’s so powerful yet so damn convoluted.) I might be able to do it using that without all the fuss and muss of theme files.
And yes, we should still use a form for Festive Tasks, but I’m thinking we stick with an embedded google form because it will give us the magic spreadsheet. Thoughts?
I basically sent folks straight to the Google reporting form last year because I wouldn’t even have known how to start making it work for GR. So we can still do that if trying to adapt it all over again, this time to WP, is too involved.
I meant to just use that reporting form as an example for the drop-down menu option, though. I mean, the way you configured it for BL it did have a drop-down menu for the selection of the holidays as well …
Oh, I see, sorry. Yep, if the custom HTML function on the WP works the way I think it should work, then I should be able to create the drop down. The only thing I’ll say without further investigation, is that the custom HTML menu might have to be created with the menu items added manually – I don’t think there’s a way to code it to pull from categories/tags if you use custom html. BUT I could be totally wrong about that. Won’t know until I try.
I suspect you’re right about the manual add-ons. Which is another reason why I’m saying we should put this in place early — this is the kind of thing that only gets worse if you don’t get a handle on at least most of it early on, so once the initial crowd has migrated to the new site, there will only be the occasional additions. (And let’s face it, even the initial crowd may be taking some time to set up their own sections, so even the initial menu items to be added won’t come in a huge, overwhelming bulk.)
*With respect to the “About Me” pages idea, I’m wondering if we would want to create a “Member Bios” page that we could have as part of the top menu, where we solicit a paragraph or so from each person and create one informational page with all of the information. *
You guys know there’s a biographical data box on the profile page for each user? I just tested it out, and when you fill it out and save it, then click on the author link at the end of one of their posts, it shows the bio at the top of their author feed.
Would that accomplish what we’re looking for? If so, no need for any menu items.
Umm, I can’t get your author bio to show? (I can see a pop-up window for Christine’s Gravatar page (where she’d be able to add a bio if she wanted to) and likewise to mine, but nothing is showing for yours, either when I hover over your icon or when I click on your “post author” link (which takes me to your blog feed) … what am I missing?
I don’t know – I see it. I’ll do a screenshot and show you what I see in a quick post.