Couple more days and The Niggerati Network is back
Since it lay fallow so long, I didn't try to pick up where it left off.
As you may know. the site itself is built around Drupal 4.5. Drupal can deliver all the functionality of Scoop, but I understand the code. So not only do I get to build on the same foundation CivicSpace is built on I can tweak, and even add functionality to it, via the official contributed module or my own minor creations.
Of course, this means I can take very little credit for all this. I've made small hacks in two places (the most recent poll only shows while it is active and the Trackback module ignores internal links) and written a couple of small modules. One, a "fortune cookie" program, is just a toy. One is invisible but useful because it automatically closes comments for specified content types of configurable age a processing cycle of my choosing. And both the recently commented threads and weekly archive sidebar boxes are mine (those the built-in pager doesn't like me very much).
Oh, yeah. I wrote the Amazon.com book search engine. The results have a purchase link, and the clicking an author's names searches Amazon for books by that author. More tweaks are forthcoming there, like adding Black American and African-specific category searches. Now that I got the rhythm I can build a search engine page pretty quickly.
Even more than the Amazon search, the functions that should be of greatest interest to members are
Blogs - You know what that is…this is supplemented by the TrackBack module, that has autodiscovery and sticks the trackbacks in the flow of your comments where (in my opinion) they belong.
To be honest, this is the one that makes me nervous because I have 100 registered members not counting me, and I have no idea what kind of space and bandwidth demands I'm setting myself up for. But I like the idea of setting up something of an incubator. I'm strongly considering writing an exporter that will wrap up a Drupal blog with its comments and such and spit out a Movable Type export file.
Blogapi - If you like desktop blogging clients, you can use one to post to your blog. Ultimately though, there will be reasons to post via the web interface. Specifically,
Scheduler: Lets you schedule the publication and/or unpublication of a post. At some point I'll figure out how to get the WYSIWYG editing working right, at which point I can turn on the image handling modules.
Book - A way of organizing groups or arbitrary posts, something like a digital binder. I'll be using it to (re)organize reference and historical material. It's not generally available, because the organization can't be usefully exported and it's really sort of clunky to use, but the end result is excellent.
Forum - A bulletin board.
Polls and surveys: The surveys come by way of the Webforms module, though there's Survey and Feedback modules that, being more specialized, look like they may relace webforms
Weblinks: A link farm of considerably less complexity than my last experiment but sufficient power to support the joint.
Private Messages: Like all the bulletin board systems out there, members can send and receive private messages.
