Forums, Ratings..Little Blog Update

I’ve been a little out of pocket the past few weeks and it’s cut back on my posting quite a bit.  Friday’s S3 post was my first in several weeks which is not ideal as I’d like to get a couple posts out each week.  Once I slip a few days writing, well it’s easy for me to slip a few more, so I’m hoping to get a little routine going again.

Posting aside, I’ve still have been working on some site improvements over the past few weeks.  COCM runs on WordPress and there’s no shortage of plugins and enhancements out there.  The blog currently has quite a few plugins installed, but only a few enabled.  I often download a couple, install them and see if they add to the site.  If they do I leave them on, but more often I usually just disable them.  I try and stay conservative with the user experience, with all those bells and whistles out there I’m really tempted to go crazy, but if they don’t add to the experience(which is really just reading) I don’t think they are worth it.

That said I’ve rolled out a couple new features which I think will add to your Content On Content Management experience.

Post Ratings  – Post ratings are a very cool little plugin from Lester ‘GaMerZ’ Chan.  The plug-in adds a little 5 star interface to the bottom of each post and page and it lets the user community throw a little rating on the post. 

(No Ratings Yet) 

Five stars would indicate that you really liked what I wrote, one star probably means I need to work on things a little.  Obviously this feedback is mostly for me, though we will be able to create some side bar naviagation to display the most poplar posts.  The little stars are all AJAX enabled, so it’s just a click.  Give it a go.

Forums – I’ve been putting out some sample components and code examples and from time to time I recieve emails with questions or issues.  Though none of my little example projects are truely “supported”, I really would like to try and help answer any questions I can. 

In the upper nave you’ll now find a link to our forums where everyone can ask questions and hopefully recieve prompt, concise answers.  There are two forums, one for support questions specific to code examples I’ve posted on the site.  If its just a general “how would you go about doing X” type question, there is also a “General Dicussion” area.

Better Spam Control – It wasn’t too bad at first, but for the last few weeks my blog comments have been spammed pretty hard.  And not just the 70% of viagra spam…some really, really raunchy stuff. 

I’ve installed a plugin called Akismet for the comments and the new forums sport CAPTCHAs for each post.  I’m particulary impressed with Akisment as it basically reads the comments, then somehow magically decides if it’s spam.  So far so good, nothing has gotten through.

Ideas or Advice – If you have any ideas for the site or ideas for future components or examples, I’d love to hear them.  Send me an email or better yet, post somthing in the forums.

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