Re: Community Connections
James,
As directed in a different thread (almost wrote threat, Freudian Slip?), I found the forum posting in particular. I am first glad that you seem to see an opportunity for a dating/singles site that uses TW. Forgive me if this is lengthy... please do forgive me because I hope to be read and hate the fact that I am so verbose.
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OK, my friends this is a project that I want to encourage. I am trying to create something like this myself. In fact I am now a member of a bunch of dating sites as part of my research. There are so many different types of sites that it is really hard to say what is best. But it seems that the very best are very expensive commercial scripts. I think TW could do as well.
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Ok, I'm excited and want to read on... You refer to my site below. I had bought a site on ebay as I was up and coming in php/mysql and felt unsure of one the availability of scripts out there that are much better or even free. So, if you visited my site within the past couple weeks or so, you see a limited in functionality site but it works... what do I mean? Well, it actually does what one would minimally expect a dating/personals/friendship site to do. The one I got on ebay was pathetically lacking in quality. A risk one takes when not enough info. is given in an ebay auction or one doesn't know what to look for. So, an aquaintance of mine said that I could work on that, which he actually bought off ebay, at my recommendation. It seemed cool. A whole site all ready and not that expensive, I even chased the price to get the site. I was so wrong to do that. For months I tried to get it to do a minimal job as a dating/singles/personals site and there were too many flaws. So, then I found AzDzDating, and got the free version. I did just fix it up a bit, as a matter of fact. It does the minimal things that one would want, such as sending email to a member, doing a search and then being able to actually contact those persons that match the search criteria. Photoshop's Clone Stamp tool helped me get rid of the AzDzDating Lite writing. I saw nothing in the license that said I couldn't do that. I also had to change the pathetically bad use of English. So, that site is now at:
http://nationwidesingles.us The domain came with the prior mentioned dating site that I got, or that aquaintance of mine got off ebay. I may actually change the url and now the database is empty but I did save the membership info from the database of 100+ members to re-enter in the new system.
That being said, I want to see how TW can do this.
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I think that TW could very well be a good choice to create a Community Connections network. The new features in the TW cvs are truly amazing. (I have a 1.10 site, O la la, good work!)
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Of Tikiwiki? Obviously, right? I guess I could upgrade to that manually as TW is available on my servers as a Fantastico option and the tech support may either update the TW installs on a schedule unknown to me - well, actually to be honest I resell and usually I try to make it look like it is my companies sites and not that I am reselling.
As an aside, I would assume the upgrade would not overwrite any data that has been collected since the site opened, one's TW site. That would be bad. Ok, questions below...BTW, maybe we could collaborate on a site. This offer goes out to anyone interested including you, James.
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How do TW features fit in?
The trackers allow both a user info tracker and a group tracker.
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Group home pages are possible.
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Explain please. That will be of interest on some non-profit, do good, aka charity sites I have in mind. What I want to do is setup a "community" for homeless Street newspapers and to publish the content of each group as syndicated content. With my hosting options I could setup all the TW installs I wanted, one for each Street Newspaper publication and then show them how to syndicate and publish, not in that order of course. So, what would be better, one TW site with individual groups for each different street newspaper group? Forgive my redundancy. BTW, the Street Newspaper Home page is http://nasna.org - North American Street Newspapers.
The tracker plug in allows info to be put into a wiki page.
The galleries are good.
The Articles would also fit in.
The very powerful categories would work well as well.
The new friendship network must have some role here.
Ect.
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I suppose some of this is new to TW 1.10. For example, Friendship network? How could one link a gallery photo with a profile similar to one's profile on a personals site?
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For me though the idea of how to automate this process would be the greatest challenge. But I am sure a script or two and it could be done. Right Damian?
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I'd love to hear more on this. The documention that I took the time to print out, all 300+ pages is for TW 1.6, unfortunately.
yoni, do not be discouraged, the trackers are becoming very powerful and in combination with the other features could do what you want.
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How could I learn more about Trackers that would be up to date? I couldn't get a good handle on how this would fit while reading my 1.6 documentation.
brucewhealtonm, Well I went to your site http://nationwidesingles.us and was impressed. But when I dug deeper I was still impressed with the apparent direction you are going.
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When did you do this? I'm trying to get a feel as to whether or not you are referring to what I have now or what I had earlier... the bad ebay purchased script... a script that I thought would cause me too loose my members interest once they tried to use the site. I'd through in my own custom chat rooms, php based, of course. Basically I was writing all the script that should have already been there.
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But Hey. when I became a member I did not receive my confirmation e-mail. (sleeping alone again I guess, ha ha!) That was a bit of a disappointment as I wanted to see why you think your script is not very good.
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Tell me when you did this and I'll be able to answer better. I may have turned off that feature to just make it easier.
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Damian, I disagree! I think that this could be done in TW. My latest 1.10 install looks very promising for this kind of work. Hey maybe you could be hired to help? (Do you take barter? I have a 1986 Volvo wagon up for grabs!)
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I got free hosting I could barter - check out http://TriangleWebHosting.biz or
TriangleWebHosting.net
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OK,
As I say I REALLY want to do this for a Community Connections point. Not so much for “Dating??? but general connection as well I think there is great potential here. I would encourage working on this. If any one is interested I would be happy to put resources to this endever.
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I would like this to work as well. Lets collaborate. Go to http://nationwidesingles.us and see if it is the same as when you visited it last. I got some pics to add to the site and a large collection of Flash banners. Putting flash in TW would be cool. But until then I see my site having a TW compontent, i.e. extra feature, an additional link from the main site. As I learn more about TW, I include more of what is needed in the TW.
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Please note this offer has a price. I will only support working to make TW better not for making a profit. My interest is to create a place where my communities may connect to find people of simular interest. This may be dating, computers, car pooling, ect. For my part we would not be seeking people from out the community although the communitys may invite people as they see fit.
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I agree and have the same interests and would dedicate the same... from design, be it php, flash for the regular web site portion of a site, or in other ways.
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We need the chat feature to connect, in my opinion. Either on our various TW sites or here at Tikiwiki.org
Its so discouraging not to find answers when I post a question or need help. Heck, I cannot even get my emails to go through to the mailing list. Since TW has some various chat apps why not add links to those or add them here?
Bruce