Our 5punk Needs You

[spoodie]

Could someone with the magic admin privileges authorise my front page post? Just an article pimping out my STALKER let's finish.

Done, that was harder than it needed to be.

[tandino]

Could someone with the magic admin privileges authorise my front page post? Just an article pimping out my STALKER let's finish.

Done, that was harder than it needed to be.

Ta!

[Dog Pants]

Don't know why I didn't think of this sooner, but I was thinking about the reviews database that Bali was working on ages ago, and considered that there was probably just a wordpress plugin for it. Problem is, as with everything on wordpress, you get a million different plugins which don't quite seem to do what you want. I'm not quite sure what web people would call what it is I'm looking for.

Here's what I need:
An index page of reviews - games, movies, books etc. Ideally categorised.
The reviews to be like the Amazon review system - users add a short comment and give it a rating. The overall average is displayed in the index page mentioned above.
I'd rather not need to write a blog article for each thing. That's more work that 5punkers are willing to contribute. A few fields are enough.

I'm having as play about with a few right now, but any direction from those more web savvy is very welcome.

[tandino]

Don't know why I didn't think of this sooner, but I was thinking about the reviews database that Bali was working on ages ago, and considered that there was probably just a wordpress plugin for it. Problem is, as with everything on wordpress, you get a million different plugins which don't quite seem to do what you want. I'm not quite sure what web people would call what it is I'm looking for.

Here's what I need:
An index page of reviews - games, movies, books etc. Ideally categorised.
The reviews to be like the Amazon review system - users add a short comment and give it a rating. The overall average is displayed in the index page mentioned above.
I'd rather not need to write a blog article for each thing. That's more work that 5punkers are willing to contribute. A few fields are enough.

I'm having as play about with a few right now, but any direction from those more web savvy is very welcome.

I'm sure there'll be something very useful out there. Happy to help in any way I can - just looking over some now. Which have you found so far?

[Dog Pants]

I've tried a bunch of different review plugins - Benday Review System, Review Site Builder, WP Customer Reviews. None gave me what I wanted, mostly because they either didn't let other people add their own ratings, or if it did it was to rate the post rather than the product.

I think I've been looking at the wrong terminology. I'm looking at rating plugins at the moment which will let commenters rate the post and show the average rating. I could use this to put the details of the game in the main post, then people could make their mini-reviews in the comments and add their rating for the game rather than the post. It's only a semantic difference. The only thing I might struggle with there is having an index page of them all showing the ratings.

[Dog Pants]

I think I'm forming an idea of how this could be manipulated.

Have a post format which defaults to review style
Review format posts don't show on the main blog, but on the Reviews page
The review page (somehow) lists the posts as just the post name and rating

Does that sound possible? I really hate not knowing anything about web publishing, it's very frustrating.

[Dog Pants]

Okay, I had more of a play last night and more thinking. Maybe a combination of two plugins might do the trick. A reviews plugin which can be used to create the initial game description and keeps an archive of the reviews, and a user rating plugin which can then be used to rate those reviews. The problem I have with that at the moment, aside from not quite being able to find the right plugins, is that I only seem to have two options for the content at the moment - posts and pages. Posts aren't a perfect fit because they show up on the front page blog, and I only want them accessible through the archive lists, while pages will appear on the top bar. Any suggestions as top a third type of content which might do the trick?

[Dog Pants]

Hah! Yes!

Now all articles published with a category of Review will display the voting stars, all others won't. I feel like I've accomplished the first step.

[Joose]

It may well be my fault (again) but something seems to have gone wobbly with the front page. I cant log in. When I try to log in to the front page it says "success!" and takes me to the forum. If I then go back to the front page I am logged out again. I tried going to comment on a post, thinking it might take me through a different log in route, and it does indeed tell me to log in to comment. Clicking on that presents me with "you have successfully logged out."

I don't think that's what is supposed to happen.

[Dog Pants]

Ah, I've had that problem. It fixed itself eventually but I can't remember if it was something I did.

[Joose]

I'll see if a cache clearing sorts it then.

[Dog Pants]

I tried that, as well as different browsers and complaining to Roman. I thought it was something to do with my account also being the WP admin account, which has a different name. Apparently not if it's doing it to you too, but it might well be something to do with accessing the WP dashboard.

[Roman Totale]

I tried that, as well as different browsers and complaining to Roman

Well I am the resident IT guru.

[Dog Pants]

Right, a few things to come of the lurkers thread which might make the site more attractive and useful:

Link back to the main page from the forum - I'd actually like to have a unified top bar across the whole site.
Better 5cheduler / 5cheduler on the forum - I don't like the bodged 5cheduler I put on the front page, and one on the top bar would work nicely with the point above.
Quicker loading front page - I'm certain that the slow loading is caused by the shite I've put in Wordpress, but I'm a complete amateur and I'm amazed the thing works at all quite frankly.
Disco board - we miss it so.

I would fucking love to have the knowledge to do all of this myself, but my IT specialisation is elsewhere and I've pretty much reached my limit without spending more time than I have learning web bashing. I don't want to assume that our web types can do any better, because I expect that's a whole field of specialisations I don't even know about. What's more I wouldn't be presumptuous enough to expect anyone to help just because they might have the skills, because I know the pressures of real life as much as anyone. However, if anyone can help I'll offer a blow job off Roman as reward. If not, could anyone suggest the sort of figures we're looking at to hire someone in India to do it for us? I know Grimmie outsourced the 5punky Lets Play intro for a reasonable fee. I'd be willing to front up some cash while I have it if it's within the range of my expendable income (i.e. what's left of my Christmas bonus), but I don't know if we're talking £10 or £1000.

[tandino]

Right, a few things to come of the lurkers thread which might make the site more attractive and useful:

Link back to the main page from the forum - I'd actually like to have a unified top bar across the whole site.
Better 5cheduler / 5cheduler on the forum - I don't like the bodged 5cheduler I put on the front page, and one on the top bar would work nicely with the point above.
Quicker loading front page - I'm certain that the slow loading is caused by the shite I've put in Wordpress, but I'm a complete amateur and I'm amazed the thing works at all quite frankly.
Disco board - we miss it so.

I would fucking love to have the knowledge to do all of this myself, but my IT specialisation is elsewhere and I've pretty much reached my limit without spending more time than I have learning web bashing. I don't want to assume that our web types can do any better, because I expect that's a whole field of specialisations I don't even know about. What's more I wouldn't be presumptuous enough to expect anyone to help just because they might have the skills, because I know the pressures of real life as much as anyone. However, if anyone can help I'll offer a blow job off Roman as reward. If not, could anyone suggest the sort of figures we're looking at to hire someone in India to do it for us? I know Grimmie outsourced the 5punky Lets Play intro for a reasonable fee. I'd be willing to front up some cash while I have it if it's within the range of my expendable income (i.e. what's left of my Christmas bonus), but I don't know if we're talking £10 or £1000.

I mentioned this in the lurker thread but for ease I'll pop it in here too. I'll put aside an evening or two this week to look at the site and see if there's owt I can do to help. For structural stuff such as nav and scheduler I'd need access to our web server so I can back up and fuck with the phpbb codez. Wordpress tweaking should be possible without, but web server access would help a lot.

[Dog Pants]

Cheers Tandino. I don't have a problem with that, but it's FJ's site so I'll let him hand over Teh Codez if he's happy.

[Grimmie]

I talked to someone on People Per Hour about a scheduler and they quoted about £400, which was a bit more than I'd considered paying.

Is it worth finding a forum that had bolt-ons like our old one did and seeing about transferring all the posts to that?

I made a Google Calendar scheduler some time ago but it didn't get much traction.
https://www.google.com/calendar/embed?s ... ope/London

I can export it in an iframe all customised (week/month/agenda view etc).

[Dog Pants]

Hmm. Yeah, I can't really justify spending £400 on the 5cheduler. I know there are things out there, I've seen them on other forums, but as usual I've no idea about how we would go about doing it. I've scheduled Fri/Sat games for the next 99 weeks on the front page anyway.

[FatherJack]

Cheers Tandino. I don't have a problem with that, but it's FJ's site so I'll let him hand over Teh Codez if he's happy.

That's fine, any admin can send him the details if they catch up with him before me. I'm likely to be up unusual hours this week.

[TezzRexx]

I'm willing to help out with codez if need be too, (I'm ASP.net based but PHP isn't too difficult to get your head around.) so just poke me if you need a hand