Themis-Athena
10/01/2021

This is in response to comments made / questions asked earlier (by MbD and / or Christine) re: the working of “project” pages.

Leaving aside special formats such as quotes and image galleries etc., WP basically allows for three types of posts (or post-like input): “posts”, “pages” and “projects”.  Those who are familiar with WP will know most or all of this — or at least most of what I’m saying about the first two of these — but briefly, to put things into context, especially for the WP newbies:

Posts are those contributions of yours that go into the blogroll / continuous feed (= the dashboard on BookLikes).  On WP, they come with both a “like” and a “comment” option; i.e., essentially they work the way things did on BL — we can have discussions right in the comments section of the post.  As comments are “nested” (i.e., replies and follow-up comments are indented further than the original comment, even if in this particular design theme not quite as clearly as on BL), several conversations on the same post can go on at the same time without comments overlapping and getting in each others’ way.

This is how probably somewhere around 90% (or at any rate, the vast majority) of the contents of the joint blog will be created.

Pages are contributions that do NOT go into the blogroll / continuous feed.  You have to specifically make them visible in some way or other, e.g., by including them in a sidebar or top bar menu which then links to the page in question (or by linking there from another page).

Also, pages do not have a comment function (though on WP you can “like” them).

Thus, pages are a great place for permanent admin announcements — e.g., the Bingo Rules on this blog are formatted as a page.  So is my main Literature index on my personal blog.

Projects are essentially a combination / cross section of posts and pages.  Like posts, they allow for both comments and “likes”.  However, like pages, they do not appear in the main blogroll / feed but have to be made visible in another way (e.g., as part of a menu).  The black admin sidebar category under which you find all of a given blog’s projects is called “Portfolio” (it sits right under “Pages”).  Also, projects do not share the blog posts’ tags and categories: that way, you can (inter alia) create one or more separate feeds for your projects to which you can also link (instead of just to a single project) from a menu.

I think on this blog, “projects” may be a good tool for every type of post that, on the one hand, we want site members to be able to access at all times without having to search the main blogroll / feed, and which on the other hand, we want people to be able to comment on.

E.g., I don’t know whether the Nose Graze plugin would allow us to create book lists — if it doesn’t, we could copy over the existing book lists for the various bingo squares into one project page per square / book list, to which others then could either add books directly (if they have the admin rights to do so) or make suggestions in the comments (the way we originally did this on BL, except that this time it wouldn’t fall to MbD alone to add the books; everybody with admin rights could pitch in).

Ditto the “Questions” section: We could create one basic “Questions” project page / post, include it in one of the overall bingo admin menus (sidbar or top bar), and questions could then be asked in the comments — with the answers to questions that don’t merely concern a single issue (e.g., “can book xyz be used for square abc?”) but a matter of policy (such as some of my questions in this year’s game as to the interplay of various spell cards) then — if we think it might come up again — copied into the main body of the “questions” project post as such.

On my personal blog, I am using “projects” mainly for the master update posts concerning my various reading projects; e.g., Halloween Bingo 2021.

BUT note that my top menu bar contains links — other than to my main blog post feed and my contact page — to my main index pages (literature, movies, music; all formatted as WP “pages”) AS WELL AS to the separate “(ongoing) projects” blogroll generated from all those of my projects in a portfolio category named (you guessed it) “ongoing”.  A separate additional menu showing all of my ongoing projects is contained in my sidebar (as are menus for my completed projects and a number of  other indexes) .   So, visitors to my blog have two different ways of finding the master update posts for all my ongoing projects in one place; either via the top bar menu and the dedicated “ongoing projects” blogroll linked there, or via the relevant sidebar menu.  I think we could do something similar for those bingo admin posts that do invite comments (and therefore can’t be formatted as WP “pages”), but which should nevertheless be accessible at all times without getting buried in the main blog post feed.

Essentially, the combination of separate “project” blogrolls and menus would allow us to create dedicated discussion sections or feeds that could have a similar function as the “discussion” subsections on Goodreads (“admin”, “the squares”, etc.) without interfering with the main blog feed and / or with the blog members’ individual feeds, such as auto-generated on the basis of their authorship category.

I hope this doesn’t all sound too complicated — it really isn’t; it’s probably just a matter of playing around with things … and there are probably also yet more ways of using “projects” that will occur to us once we start tinkering with the feature.