We’re rebuilding Textkit using Drupal. It’s a social media application which will allow for a greater sense of community and group publishing across all parts of the site.
At this point, we’re asking for help with the pre-soft launch. There’s still a ton of work to do - including migrating the forum, but at this point it would help to see some profiles come on board and some posts and comments.
This activity will help us with the next step which is customizing the template. It’s very hard to develop a template without content in place.
If you would like to help out please consider:
creating an account
writing a quality post to the Textkitters blog
participating with blog posts comments
rounding out your profile, including image
provide feedback/report bugs on your experience
subscriber to the email Feedburner feed
Again, this will give us some much needed content in order to develop the template design as well as test out the permissions on the tools.
Once this is behind us, we’ll next tackle content migration and forum migration.
thanks!
hi ed,
thanks for creating the account. Please feel free to create a Textkit blog in the ‘digital resources’ category on your G’Oogle conent. I think the whole “G’Oogle” term is so funny! Only a Textkitter would probably get it, but I laugh every time I see it.
The changes are much needed and should inject a lot of life into the community. I still have not developed the template nor really customized all the modules, I’ll do this once I see some content in there.
I’d be happy to subscribe and post a comment here and there but I just can’t think of anything else I can really contribute to the site. Nice idea though.
It´s a really nice idea. I want to contribute in what my possibilities let and with my dreadful English, but we can also use Latin -as you like.
I have created an account.
@IreneY - thanks for creating an account. It wouldn’t surprise me at all if the community takes a few twists and turns concerning what’s blogged. If there’s one thing I have noticed, we all have a lot of broad interests and I think there could be quite a bit to share/talk about in the content of language/education
@Gonzalo - good to see you here too. Thanks for creating an account and feel free to post back here or create a blog post in the Textkitter Community section with feedback/ideas
I’ve registered myself and subscribed as well (in my Google Reader). However, the title of the page is “Textlit” and not “Textkit”, that should probably be fixed.
Anyhow, I think the forum should be migrated over as well, and as far as I know there exists good solutions for phpBB and Drupal integration.
Is the new Textkit pictured as something like a clearinghouse for Latin and Greek learning, news, and information? I think that would greatly expand the value of this website. I’ve been thinking that there is a lot of great content written in these forums that would be better served in a more traditional article/blog.
One thing that would be useful would be to have a series of reviews of different textbooks and approaches. There are countless recommendations for Lingua Latina, Wheelock, etc., and lots of discussion of study habits and ways to combine these methods.
Jeff is probably using Drupal to allow for more flexible content publishing:
At this point, we’re asking for help with the pre-soft launch. There’s still a ton of work to do - including migrating the forum, but at this point it would help to see some profiles come on board and some posts and comments.
Basically, Jeff probably isn’t going to ditch the forum in favor of blogging. There’ll be both, so that we all can post articles and such in a more organized fashion.
Think of Drupal as an easy way to have a wiki, forum, collaborative blog, and more (there are add-ons)… all wrapped conveniently in one package. Obviously, most of this has not yet been set up…
Quoting thesaurus: “I’ve been thinking that there is a lot of great content written in these forums that would be better served in a more traditional article/blog.” With Drupal, we’re able to take some of this content, rewrite it as articles, and easily post them to the site in their appropriate sections.
to follow up on the blog / drupal / forum comments.
with the new site, we’ll still have the textkit forum. Drupal has a tool to convert phpbb forums into drupal forums.
Drupal is pretty dang amazing! what it allows sites to do is create content types (pages, blogs, forums, articles whatever) then associate those content types with a category system, then create roles (user groups) and assign different permissions. There’s a lot more to it, but that’s the core.
So because you can define content types/categories/roles you can come up with endless variations of access control for group publishing.
As an example, Will’s setting up Pharr. So he’'ll create a content type called book, give the book the category Pharr, create a role and with permissions and assign users to the role. In this way group publishing/moderation/access can be done quite nicely.
Drupal is not an easy project to customize, so it’s coming a bit slow - but we’ll get there.
For me, what I like about it best is that you will see Textitter particpation across the entire site and not just here in the forum.
For example, I plan to allow textkitters with a set level of points to post comments to the Textkit downloadable PDFs.
Drupal is also known for being a group blogging tool. Every user account is given it’s own blog. I’m actually trying to disable a bit of that and guide all blogs through the Textkitter blog because it could get out of control.
I think Drupal is a perfect choice for education/schools/department websites.
pretty neat idea! I’ll install the multiple language support module and if someone wants to translate instructions - it would be fun to navigate the site in Latin or Greek
a big goal i have is to use social voting to classify the best of breed forum topics and information. There are over 62K textkit posts but only about 3K of this is indexed in Google.
With social promotion, the best of breed content could be given indexing priority by featuring on pages outside of the normal forum constuct which isn’t the best for SEO.
I experimenting with a digg style module called drigg. this could be one way to socially promote good threads.
hahah good catch. The migration has got me a bit nervous, but I’ll get through it if I make lots of backup and go slow. I need to do it last once the site is ready to go live to avoid lost threads or down time.
Yes, I hope so. That’s ultimately up to Textkitters to decide since its a group effort. I would like to see the topics greatly expanded. In the past, it was a lot harder for sites to take on a wide range of topics without spiraling into a free for all that turns everyone off. but with drupal’s social media tools for burying bad posts and giving a wide range of user permissions to help promote and demote content - i think we can take on a lot of different things while still keeping a common core identity and voice.
One neat thing would be all the gray topic areas which in the past were very difficult to moderate - such as summer workshops. It’s hard to write a script to tell the difference between a quality summer language workshop and an affiliate spam post. But with humans in control, i think we can talk about things like that, and that will be good because there’s so much going on. not just w/ Greek/Latin but in the larger content of language, classics, education, books, travel etc.
So drupal can really flatten the moderation process by distributing it to a larger group of people, it’ll be sweet.
