Hi everyone-

We are adding enhanced polling to Version 1.2.15, which is due out soon.

The next major feature we are adding is support for blogs within eve. We will be finalizing our spec for this soon, but I was looking for feedback about how you would like to see blogs integrated.

One approach is to treat blogs as simply a new content type, with blogs simply integrated in the existing categories and forums. This is probably the easiest, most straight-forward way of implementing the feature.

Another approach would be to allow community members to have their own dedicated blog pages, with the blogs in essence separated from the community.

There are other possibilities as well, but feel free to post your preferences here. What would you be looking for in such a feature?

Thanks!

I defintely perfer allow community members to have their own dedicated blog pages. It may take more time to integrate it into Eve, but I think this will solve many confusion in the future. A new content type is just confuse many new Eve end users, as is totally different to what normally do.

While this is something different, maybe add an option for the user to publish their blog entry to the forum area - A category/forum which specificed by the admin.

Also I believe many user want some of the blog entry only appear to certain members, it would be good if it allow to limit who can view the entry based on the buddies list or something similar.

Ted, it's good to hear the polling is enhanced in 1.2.15. Thanks

it may work to have the blogs integrated in as a content type.

I'd want to know how blogs would work with content islands.

As for other preferences, mine are pretty much typical of blogs:
-ability for the author to tag posts
-ability of users to search for posts by tags or by date
-permalinks
-user comments on posts
-perhaps the ability to add "jumps" in a post (aka when looking at the posts on one page in chronological order, the user can click on, say, "continued" on any one post and be taken to that post's full/permalink page, which may contain additional content)

I'm interested not so much in allowing my users to create their own blog as in creating my own blog as the owner of the site, so I'm thinking of things more from that perspective.

Is there any ETA at this point for when blogs will be available?

This message has been edited. Last edited by: bdschmerl,

bdschmerl-

The ETA will really depend on the extent of the feature set. If we implement as merely a content type, it will be pretty simple/quick. If it is more complex (personal blogs, areas outside of the cateogory/forum realm), then it will take longer. I'll provide an ETA once we get our spec finalized. I'm going to give this topic another week or so to allow some discussion before we make a final decision as to feature set.

To everyone reading/thinking about this, the more details you can provide about the user experience that you would prefer, the better.

Another reason I support each member have its own blog page instead of content type is I believe is more easy to subscribe the RSS feed of one particular member.

For example, if I want to read Ted's blog only, I can simply subscribe his blog's RSS feed. But if it's only a content type, I don't think you can do it, as all the blog entry will simply appear on a forum.

Am i right?

I also think for a large community, if all different members blog entry appear on a forum, it will make it very confusing.

Another feature I think is needed is some tag cloud on the blog index page, once you click it, it will list all the entry from all different members who had that tag. Maybe in the future, can even expand allow the option to show all the entry of a particular tag from the whole Groupee network community. Something similar to what SixApart's new product - Vox is doing or what wordpress.com is doing

I really want blogs to be incorporated in such a manner that admins (or even users) can control who can see them (anyone, registered members only, premium level members only, etc.) and definitely want admins to be able to limit their creation to defined user groups. So if that means incorporating it more seamlessly into Groupee than I'm for that. Of course, we've also been waiting for this for so long that I want it as soon as possible and am hoping this has already been figured out.

I've never been a blogger myself so I don't know what kind of feature attributes they tend to have, but my personal thought is that most of our community users haven't done blogs either, and so the simpler they are to set up the better. And they won't know what they're missing if they can't add in news feeds or other more advanced blog elements.

I guess I'm also wondering what MySpace.com's trick has been to become the top web site in terms of users over the past year (probably in about the time you guys first started teasing us with 2.0 ). Is it their 'add friends' tool? The ability to group together spaces by likes/dislikes? Again, I've never really explored this site so I don't know exactly what they do, but it really has been remarkable to see their success and maybe there's something to be learned from that.

One final thought I have is that it would be neat to see if someone could post a message and then have a tool within the posting box to 'add post to personal blog'. For example, I had one of my site's more eloquent members respond to a new thread on the unrest between Israel and Lebanon and put down some really profound personal thoughts on his feelings about what is going on in the Mideast. He concluded by saying he liked his comments and was going to go cut and paste it into his personal blog. I'd love for these blogs to be self-contained in my community and users could have the opportunity to post in the manner they're used to and then have these posts then be archived in their own personal blogs.

I would like to see a little bump in the amount of disk storage space to allow for posting of photos directly to the blogs without having to quickly force us above our limits. It would be hard to justify pruning posts in photos that are contained in blogs. Kind f takes away from the "keep a journal" idea if we go and rip out pages in their journal every 30 days.

Both please. Content type first and then introduce user based blogs after that...

I agree with a content type as a first step, if that would be fast to implement, because I'd like access to some kind of blog within the next couple months.

Any more news on the blog functionality? I know release dates are a touchy subject, but any ballpark ideas (I'm asking because I would like to use the blog on my site but have specific time requirements)?

No update right now, but we will hopefully have an update for you soon.

Ok... So what's happening with 2.0?

Is this NOT 2.0? I'm really confused now.

Blogs will be added to Version 1.3 of eve.

Studentfilms- the work we were doing for "2.0" became a totally different (not yet released) service, which we announced previously. What was originally goign to be an eve upgrade when we started development took on a life of its own and we decided to keep eve a separate entity, for which development continues on its own.

Ok...but what I'm most interested in is something like "articles" for my community. That's what I would love - and I think so would alot of other people.

Is the Blog module of Eve capable of being used for "articles"?

Hi studentfilms-

We'll have more details about the features in 1.3 soon. I just don't want to go completely on the record until we are farther along in the development process. There's always a chance that we hit a snag an have to modify our spec.

We had been waiting for the 2.0 product as thought it would be available sooner than it has ended up being.

Instead, we have integrated another product at our DanceScape eZine at http://www.dancescape.com/ezine

To integrate the forums, we used the Content Islands from Eve throughout the site so that it would be associated with the forums sections from http://dancescape.com/mydancefriends

In terms of videos, went over to your site (looks great) and noticed you had something called "The Little Dance". Could we feature this on our Dance Entertainment Video site at http://www.dancescape.TV

Would be a great fit for our members!

Yes - you can link to it. But be sure to link to the page where the film is played - linking to the actual Quicktime file itself is not allowed.

Glad that you like the site!

Whatever you do with blogs, please make sure we can block members from using them. That is not something we want on our message board.

how are you coming with blogs? Any idea when they'll be available?

We are still working on the blog feature. Once we get close to a beta stage, we will make a formal announcement about the feature.