Social Reporting blogs and portal

[ed]

Transition Network are launching a social reporting pilot project in September to run for three months. It's all rather cutting edge and hip to the max. Charlotte Du Cann, who runs this: ​http://transitionnorwich.blogspot.com/ is our editor. From now on 'SR' means 'Social Reporting' and 'SRs' is 'Social Reporters'.

It's about telling the inside story of being in Transition, to complement the currently very explicit knowledge forms on the site. And it's the beginning of an alternative news/story network, using a mix of citizen journalism editorial style, and storytelling approach. NB: there's a para below about another branch of storytelling which may want to share the story portal with the SRs in 2012.

The pilot will be 12 bloggers around the UK (and probably some outside) who will blog 2 or 3 times per month each. There will be an editor, who will write posts, particularly monthly round-ups. There will also be guest editors, who may write weekly round-ups (it is assumed that the guest editors can use the editor's blog). At the end of the pilot, we will do a lessons learned reflection to work out whether to keep it going, and how to open it up to others. We cannot assume to have enhancement budget at that point, so all work done now will be for the pilot, and quite probably for the roll-out.

We will use the current blog set up as it's fine. SR posts can go into the /blogs page and feeds and blocks, but they also need to go to a separate 'portal' called "stories.transitionnetwork.org" which needs its own stuff outlined below, and could have a slightly cooler look and feel (this can be a trial for a groovier design if that's useful to Laura).

There is an overlap here with /blogs which we generate and aggregate. 'SR' is a specific type of post however, which is technically a subset of /blogs, but semantically quite different.

Beyond the pilot, if suitable, we will want to add other SRs easily off the main platform. And if possible, have an option to aggregate into the SR workflow.

Also, depending on how things pan out, there is another type of 'Storytelling' - the 'mythical' style, which may get project funding next year. This is a project to teach schoolkids about 'mythical' style storytelling (as opposed to our 'citizen journalism' approach). So there may well be other users wanting blog style tools, which will fit into the 'stories.tn.org' portal (ie there may be two story-esque blog subsets in 2012)...

Social Reporters (SR):

• standard blog technology but semantically different so needs to work with the existing blog views as well as new SR ones
• new user type? Social Reporter: gives a blog to the user. That blog feeds into /blogs and the SR portal
• SR blog to have 'stage' as an option - to feed into the portal and the stage landing pages #266
• To be represented on their public profile on TN.org "Social Reporter" with link to blog feed

INDIVIDUAL SR BLOG ITEM PAGES:

• blocks to show other latest SR items
• block to show other SRs linked to their blogs

SR PORTAL requirements:

'stories.transitionnetwork.org'
'transitionnetwork.org/stories'

Panels page - editable and moveable by Ed to feature:

• Latest stories
• Map with pins where users are - click on the pin go to their blog feed
• Featured editorial
• Featured post
• Tag cloud
• List of SRs (hyperlinked to public profiles on TN.org)
• Couple of handy editable panels to be used for general bodging, photos etc.

Other views:

• feed
• widget with latest stories
• block to put around the site

[ed]

disable blog module
re-create the blog content type

[ed]

Please add a social networking toolbar to the SR blog posts - to enable users to 'tweet this' or 'facebook this' -

[jim]

1. "Social Reporting blog post" CT added, paths = social/[author-name-raw]/[yyyy]-[mm]/[title-raw] -
2. Fields added to CT: Stages, Themes, Video links (took the liberty of adding the last two, seemed sensible).
3. "social reporter blogger" role added, can create the above
4. New views panes 'Blog & Social Reporting teasers' and 'Blog & Social Reporting list' available to use in Panels pages.
5. 3 panels set up (please note language for clarity of issue tracking!): SR Home, SR Blogger home and SR blog post page.
6. Breadcrumbs done
7. test SR page (non panels) ​http://www.transitionnetwork.org/social/transition-admin
8. Wrote custom Panels argument handler to take /social/[user-alias] and get the user object from it - pretty nifty if I do say so...

Test pages:

• SR Home: ​http://www.transitionnetwork.org/social
• SR Blogger home: ​http://www.transitionnetwork.org/social/transition-admin
• SR Post :​http://www.transitionnetwork.org/social/transition-admin/2011-07/jims-test-post

TO DO

• SR posts included in /blogs view (very quick... need test data removed first)
• "Social Reporter" link to blog feed on user's profile page
• Start on all the other panes required in spec etc...

[jim]

9. Profiles now show if user is social reporter - e.g. ​http://www.transitionnetwork.org/people/jim-kirkpatrick
10. Map now pane available and added to /social page
11. SRs list added to /social (both this and previous rely on users being given 'social reporter blogger' role.
12. "More by [user name]" and "Latest reports" panes added to /social/[username] - e.g. ​http://www.transitionnetwork.org/social/transition-admin

Questions:

• How do you want the 'featured editoral' and 'featured post' to work? (nodequeue, manually added via panels, 'promote this page' etc?)
• Tag cloud? How 2005! We'll need a module to do it really: ​http://drupal.org/project/tagadelic - ok?
• What editable bits? Might as well add these yourself, but very happy to go over them in Skype.
• "widget with latest stories" - What do you mean widget? As in what Laura did before?
• "blocks to put around the site" - What blocks are needed?

To Do:

• SR posts included in /blogs view (very quick... need test data removed first)
• Add feed

[ed]

only one thing left:

1. video embed as context needed - also needed for the training page, and bound to be used on the homepage...

[ed]

2. add a pane showing 'other posts in this stage' to go on story blog posts and the stage pages
3. associate the number to each stage where it's referenced

[ed]

4. add 'latest blogs from xx stage' panes to go onto SR homepage (and see 2 above)

[ed]

5. social media icons - tweet this and facebook this - as seen on:

​http://www.thegreatcraneproject.org.uk/blogs/amy-and-roland/feathers-and-flight
Laura says the 'social links module' ??

we could just start with facebook and twitter

[laura]

​http://drupal.org/project/service_links is the module.

[jim]

1. 'Social' now 'Stories' everywhere (I think!)
2. Video embedded - see ​http://www.transitionnetwork.org/stories/charlotteducann/2011-07/jims-test-post
3. To do
4. All stages checkboxes/views should now be shown with their number.
5. To do
6. module added to SVN, pending release to LIVE shortly (hopefully).

Issue: As you can see from my test post since I made Charlotte the author: ​http://www.transitionnetwork.org/stories/charlotteducann/2011-07/jims-test-post - SR bloggers MUST have a 'proper' user name, she/you will need to change it to "Charlotte Du Cann" from "charlotteducann". This rule applies to all bloggers, no way around it, soz.

So, just the 'blog posts by stage' views/panes and some styling to do... plus feedback and faff, obvs.

[ed]

charlotte's username duly updated -

[jim]

charlotte's username duly updated again - used proper capitalisation to avoid breadcrumbs looking like arse. Again, all SRs need proper, capitalised usernames.

Am doing the views by stage now.

[jim]

See: ​http://www.transitionnetwork.org/stories/charlotte-du-cann/2011-07/jims-test-post

1. Service links module up and enabled, added some of the bigger ones, more also-rans here: ​https://www.transitionnetwork.org/admin/settings/service_links/services
2. Blogs view for this stage added to stages: ​http://www.transitionnetwork.org/starting
3. And to individual stories post: ​http://www.transitionnetwork.org/stories/charlotte-du-cann/2011-07/jims-test-post
4. Blogs by stage added to RHS of /stories. All there, only 1 showing due to lack of stories.
5. Tagadelic (tag cloud) installed and on page... Not quite the ticket as it shows tags for a whole vocabulary... This means we EITHER create a new Tags vocab for just Stories posts, OR we install ​http://drupal.org/project/tagadelic_views and try another approach integrated with views. Ed? See 'more tags' for full TN tag cloud: ​http://www.transitionnetwork.org/tagadelic/chunk/2 - Ooooh!

I'm done for now, passing back your way for thoughts.

[ed]

1. nice
2. nice
3. nice
4. nice
5. hmm. so with tagadelic we could have tag clouds for each of the CTs, right? that would be cool - if so, do it and we'll try it and see what happens - always was the plan for tags to tinker with them later. If not, pls explain.

[jim]

Tagadelic: allows a fancy block per vocab. However, 'Tags' is site-wide vocab, so the list of tags on the stories pages will not be representative of the stories section, but of the whole site.

So we can either add a new, empty "Stories tags" vocab specific to the new section and pages, or I can try to use the Tagadelic Views module to show just the stories 'cut' of the main site-wide 'Tags' vocab...

More soon, but in the mean time are we done bar the tweaking?

[ed]

Try to use the tagadelic views module to show just the stories cut of the main site-wide tags vocab if possible - that'll give us more flexibility for the future.

I think we're done bar the tags thing - I can't quite get my head around the layout but that will come...

[ed]

this alright then? using just showing the stories cut of the main tags?

[jim]

I'm going to try this other module (views tagadelic) out tonight and report back.

[jim]

(un)done.

It's a 10 second job to re-enable...

[jim]

WRONG TICKET -- sorry!

[ed]

hehe - ta

[jim]

​http://drupal.org/project/tagadelic_views does the job... in SVN and should be on live tomorrow night.

[jim]

New views panes added 'Tag Cloud - small/medium/large' added that allows tag clouds for each content type. Small one added to the /social page in place of old one.