AC0/RD Digest & our network ambitions
Something that’s been needed for a long time is a reliable network digest for our users and subscribers. I’ve used Wordpress.org for the longest time (almost 4 years, in fact) as the HQ for our community site, however I’ve started to use Git and static sites as the new skeleton for the AC0/RD Network. In today’s post, I’m going to talk about what happened to the old portal, why Github alone isn’t good enough for what we are doing, and also about what the actual title of the post suggests: our email subscription service.
Grab yourself a tasty beverage and snack, because this is going to be a slightly longer post than usual...
Rest in peace Portal #1 - 2016-20
Thanks to AC0RD’s first sponsor, Sean Firth, I got into the Wordpress.org community when I was only 13, and to this day I am still an everyday user of the popular CMS. I used Wordpress to create what was known as the “Portal” for AC0RD, which had the following features:
A blog
A database - for all the data collected by our bots & software
A forums & community section - where our members could talk about anything and everything, regardless of whether it was directly related to AC0RD or not, as well as the projects that we are/were working on
A media section (with groups & user profiles ^^)
Project management
Community growth
Over the years, I had about 10 members (Nicholas Antipas, Josh Richards, Sean, etc) contribute small bits of data and helpful stuff to the portal, but mostly it was a one-man-band. I was the singer, the guitarist, the drummer, and the roadie. Almost all of the forum posts I did myself, and the site was sort of like a large notebook, where only I contributed stuff to.
I told myself that this would only be temporary, and that it would be good for documentation (SDLC) purposes (to an extent, this is roughly the same situation now - except each post is being read by a few people, the repositories on Git & the new portal are getting edited by more people. It’s a start). But as the months stretched into years, I couldn’t help feeling disappointed about the lack of community growth. I’d thrown almost every bit of my spare time into this project, and it led to a lot of sleepless nights (not to mention every time I screwed up something on the site, like the dreaded white screen of death. I often joke that 99% of my PHP knowledge comes from reading those error messages).
This is why that when the first iteration (technically the second iteration, however the real original only lasted <72 hours before I broke it - in my defense I was VERY new to WP) bit the dust, after the initial shock, tears and screams I took a few deep breaths and decided that I would live with it.
The portal had become a wasteland, a barren wild wild west that only had 1 person as far as the eyes could see. Every now and again you’d see signs of a skeleton that still had some flesh, but those sights were rapidly being swallowed up by the growing chasm of self-doubt and despair that accumulated over my 3.5 years as the maintainer.
I talked about this to my mentor Nick, and we both agreed that maybe it was for the better. While I had recent backups of the old portal, maybe it was better for us to just make those backups open-source and create a fresh portal. This way, the documentation would still exist (it would just be less easy to navigate), but we’d have the advantage of a fresh start, and all in all a better springboard for leaping into the pool of software development. I set up a new installation of Wordpress with hostgator and that was that.
With the recent influx of members - Rishabh Chakrabanty, Basanta Kandel, Dylan Vekaria and so many others (thanks largely to the Facebook post we did on our page), we have a fledgling, but thriving, community on github, with projects being developed on git, discussed on slack & reddit, and shared on the website, with this being accumulated on the portal (for more information about this accumulation of data, I’d recommend checking out our post on dashboards: here: https://blog.acord.software/post/611809431430283264/html-dashboards-for-administration).
The old portal will live forever in my - and our - memories, and in our open-source database, but I look to the future, and this is the way it will be.
Why Github isn’t enough
Github is great for software development, especially collaborative open-source work. But when you want to build a community around your company (especially when a huge amount of your community won’t have, or want, github accounts), you need something else.
Wordpress is great, because with plugins like buddypress you can create social networks like Facebook on a smaller scale for your club/organisation (again, I’d recommend checking out another one of our posts about social network construction here: https://blog.acord.software/post/611414544827432960/constructing-a-social-network).
I’m a big sucker for integrations between our services (for a list of services that we use, check out this page on our Stellarios documentation: https://acord.software/stellarios/hydejack/2020-01-25-integrations/). Github is great, because you can connect your various online accounts to it with services like Zapier or Integromat. To get my dream network, we’re going to have to use services like those.
AC0/RD Members Digest
I’d hazard a guess that you’re part of a number of online communities. Wouldn’t it be great to have the latest notifications and news delivered daily, weekly or monthly for all those communities?
Buddypress (thanks to plugins available on wordpress.org) has had this kind of feature - email subscriptions - for a while. What I wanted when I started this project was a perfect amalgamation between our awesome online communities - Reddit, the Portal, Github, Facebook, etc. While we could implement some sort of system that would send an email from Facebook, an email from Reddit, etc, for the digest (so that you’d be burdened with 5 emails everytime you get a digest), I thought of something a bit different.
The ideal scenario would be to be able to link your Portal (wordpress) account with the online services/websites mentioned above ^^, and for the content that is relevant to your account (i.e. from your friends or groups) to be emailed to you, as well as site-wide notices. Unfortunately, the closest you can get to this at the moment is to share a link to your social media profiles on your Wordpress profile. Obviously, this won’t do.
Over the last 24 hours, I’ve been thinking: how do we create a network digest?
What we will be doing is we’ll create weekly posts on the new AC0/RD Portal, which will have the latest content from our online profiles. You’d then be able to sort through these, and as you’re logged into those accounts, be able to find what’s relevant to you easily. This post can then be sent to your email, and can work in with integrations like Gamipress.
Of course, we can also easily set up automatic post systems (for the forums WITHIN groups on the portal) that would then be sent into your newsfeed. Both of these solutions would work well, and we’ll be working on ways to implement them as best as we can very soon.
<3
Limo
