Smatter of Small Site Updates
Since the velospace bike discussion forums went live three months ago I’ve been thinking of how to integrate them into the rest of the site.
Over the past few days the following changes have been made to work forum content into the rest of the site:
- Addition of a “Forums” block to the home page to track the most active forum discussions.
- Addition of “time ago” info to most content listed on the front page and user profiles. (thank you strtotime()!)
- Upgrade of user profiles to include blocks for the user’s:
- forum discussions, and
- forum comments.
- Reformat of the cluster block on user profiles to fit in with new block look and feel.
These are a bunch of small changes that on their own don’t amount to much, but put together they should help connect more disparate parts of the site. The trick is to figure out how to tie in data from Drupal, which runs under the hood of most of velospace, with data from the forum software by Vanilla.
Next I am going to see if the forum has a search API to allow for integration of forum content into bike and cluster pages. As always, if you have any suggestions please let me know.
- Greg