UnionBook

Can we make creating groups easier? I did a search just now for 'blackberry' to see if anyone had created a blackberry user group on UB. They hadn't, so I wanted to. But there wasn't a one-click step for me to create the group, having searched for it. I had to go to the main tools menu, select 'groups' from the drop down, and then from that page select 'create new group'.

I think that's not quite good enough. Think of using the Windows (argh, I said it) OS to add a printer to your PC. Whenever you open the printers dialog box there is an icon in the list of printers which is called 'add a printer'. I want that whenever I list the groups on UB there is one at the end (or the beginning, which would be better) called 'create a group', which is not a group, but a link to the group creation form.

Nick Holden 631 days ago

I'm not sure.  I haven't found it particularly difficult to create groups, nor have other users.  And there may be other priorities -- John Wood has pointed out the importance of some kind of hierarchy of groups.  What we need are skilled PHP volunteer programmers who are prepared to take the groups module and rewrite it for us.

Eric Lee 630 days ago

I've scanned through the current list of available plugins for elgg and identified the ones we might most find helpful right now. The details are in a comment to John's wishlist posting. Interestingly, having written that, I've realised that the wishlist plugin is not one I picked out. Maybe we could use that one, too. Especially as it's nearly Christmas...

Oh, and the groups_extended plugin might provide the basis for the heirarchical group structure we want. It clearly doesn't do it now, but they've done the hard work of coding up how to extend the group structure to include a 'category' for it. If we can extend it further to allow for parent-child relationships then vanya's your uncle.

Nick Holden 630 days ago

I have been checking out how the site looks on mobile devices. 

I am using a BlackBerry Bold and the site comes up very well but takes time to upload all of the images.  There are some other minor glitches but I think these are related to the site being still in development mode.

The site also seems to be working on the iPhone.  These are the only smart phones that I have access to at the moment, so I can't confirm how it works on other types of smart phones.

alexschlotzer 629 days ago

I think part of the problem is that UnionBook is resource-intensive, and there are ways to streamline it and make it more efficient. We need to look into those.

Eric Lee 629 days ago

Ive downloaded some of the information for ELGG to see if I can help work out the necessary coding to fix up some of the to-do list items.  If I have a suggestions should I just post them to the group, or should I send them to you Eric?

alexschlotzer 628 days ago

Alex, For the moment - email me.

Eric Lee 627 days ago

I don't think you need to pay to get number 1. It's what the 'flexprofile' plugin is for. Instead, we should pay Kevin to develop a parallel plugin, tentatively called 'flexgroup', so that we can build a heirarchy of groups, and add other form fields to the group entity.

Since Kevin wrote the flexprofile and the form plugins, doing this work should be quick and simple for him, and therefore cost-effective for us. He might also be persuaded that it's "good for elgg" and therefore offer us a discount rate. Presumably we'd be happy to see the plugin made available to other elgg users once it's written.

Number 2 is dependent on how we fix number 1. If the flexprofile plugin is used, there's a logic then to how we get additional fields from the profile to display elsewhere in the site. Kevin could advise best on that, I think.

Similarly, number 5 looks like it should be easy. Take the mass_mailout plugin, and fine-tune it so that it only sends to a specific group. Call it group_mailout, and there you go. Probably don't need to pay an elgg developer for that.

And there are several existing plugins tailored to embedding video. So this doesn't need to be on the 'pay for' list. They won't be perfect, but they're available.

Nick Holden 627 days ago

As for mobile devices: I am able to log in on my Nokia N800, but the browser bogs down on my dashboard and won't go any farther. It uses a Mozilla-based browser, Microb, on the Maemo diablo Linux platform.

B. Ross Ashley 627 days ago

Thanks for that feedback - I think Elgg is too resource-intensive, but we're going to fix that.

Eric Lee 627 days ago

Thanks also to Nick for his feedback - will take this into account when writing to Kevin.  Some of the things we're asking for are scheduled for inclusion in later versions of Elgg or mods.  For example, embedded video was actually in Elgg 0.9, taken out when they rewrote the whole thing for 1.0, and scheduled to re-added later on.

Eric Lee 626 days ago

The login boxes don't generally appear on my screen.  I use Opera as my browser, with Webwasher.

Ben Ross 619 days ago

We'll look into how Opera handles UnionBook -- this is not the first complaint of this kind.  Thanks for pointing it out.

Eric Lee 619 days ago

For all the techinical problems and things to do on the to do list - I am not having any problems at all on my lap top using Firefox!  Happy to be patient while this is in development mode.  My key question relates to inviting others - is there any possibility of using contact groups from email applications - I can't remember individual addresses - and keying them in individually is a bit of a turnoff. Happy to hear of any ideas  Cheers

Jill Biddington 614 days ago

That's a good idea, Jill.  There is an Elgg plug-in that seems to be able to do this, but you need to purchase it.  I'll want the advice of others on this.

Details here:

http://community.elgg.org/pg/plugins/octazen/read/11949/octazen-address-book-contacts-importer-inviteafriend-plugin

Eric Lee 613 days ago

I've solved, Item #7, under "to fix someday". Here's a sample code snippet:

$users = get_entities('user', '', '');
$content .= '<p>This site has ' . count($users) . ' registered users.</p>';

Steve Dondley 612 days ago

I tried, but as far as I can tell, the Form and flexprofile plugins do do not provide the site with the ability to add fields to a user's registration form.

Steve Dondley 612 days ago

Steve, thanks for both comments.  I tried the code you gave - see the result on the top of each page on the site.  Why is is showing 10?  I changed the variable name from $users to $usersx, but that didn't help.  Any ideas?

Eric Lee 612 days ago

OK, yeah, the documentation has a lot to be desired. I had to root around in the code. Here's what I discovered:

1466   /**
1467    * Return entities matching a given query, or the number thereof
1468    *
1469    * @param string $type The type of entity (eg "user", "object" etc)
1470    * @param string $subtype The arbitrary subtype of the entity
1471    * @param int $owner_guid The GUID of the owning user
1472    * @param string $order_by The field to order by; by default, time_created desc
1473    * @param int $limit The number of entities to return; 10 by default
1474    * @param int $offset The indexing offset, 0 by default
1475    * @param boolean $count Set to true to get a count rather than the entities themselves (limits and offsets don't apply in this context). Defaults to false.
1476    * @param int $site_guid The site to get entities for. Leave as 0 (default) for the current site; -1 for all sites.
1477    * @param int|array $container_guid The container or containers to get entities from (default: all containers).
1478    * @return array A list of entities.
1479    */
1480   function get_entities($type = "", $subtype = "", $owner_guid = 0, $order_by = "", $limit = 10, $offset = 0, $count = false, $site_guid = 0, $container_guid = null)

The upshot of this is you want to call the get_entities function like this:

get_entities('user', '', '', '', '', TRUE);

That should do the trick.

Steve Dondley 612 days ago

Oops, that should be:

get_entities('user', '', '', '', '', '', TRUE);

The $count argument, set here to TRUE, is the 7th argument.

Steve Dondley 612 days ago

The "Latest Discussion" widget that appears on a group homepage doesn't seem to be sorting by chronological order as onee might expect. Where should this go in the list?

Steve Dondley 611 days ago

I now have a better browser installed on the N800 which works much better with all the scripting on the site ... but is a resource hog too. ::shrug::

.

B. Ross Ashley 607 days ago

Almost all the problems I was having have disappeared since I created my new account.  Just a couple remain that I can see.

I'm still seeing formatting problems at the bottom of each page.  The 'More Information' bit and the Act NOW! box are being overwritten by the lower page menu.

Under the UnionBook graphic at the top of the page I see a small box with an 'x' in it, meaning there's a graphic not displaying properly...

Derek Blackadder 599 days ago

• Fix problem of 'x' appearing instead of labour photo of the year once you've logged in

:( 

I halfway fixed this for the stuff I did on the other theme, but then got another problem. I put a check for login on it, so it only displayed piccy if you were logged in.

now that's good for people logging in, who no longer see the X (IE only - firefox happy), but people looking at public pages whilst not logged in see the photo now on all public pages. Not sure what's worse....

John Wood 599 days ago

• The union name should appear together with the person's user name everywhere

Not sure if we want this? Will people *HAVE* to declare they're in a particular union? If so, you'll get many who want to have 2 or 3 spaces to list all their unions. (we did with the facebook app we made)

John Wood 599 days ago