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Personal Page Plug-in
Presentation :
This plug-in provides GLinks v3.x and LinksSQL v2.1.x administrators with the ability to allow their users to create their own personal page. It logically requires users to be authenticated and has the option of allowing users to create a mini presentation/introduction about themselves. The users can choose between different fonts, colours and overall CSS stylesheets to further personalize their page.

The page is based upon the idea of providing Links globals with personalized characteristics as well as the ability to change the display order of globals on the page and whether or not to activate the globals.


Image of Personal Page
In order 1) Welcome Message 2) User Introduction 3) Last Links 4) Last reviews 5) My Last Opinions 6) My Last Links


Personalized Globals
Users can choose to display, or not to display, globals that can be added to the ‘Personal Page’ via the admin panel. The globals have specific values that can then be modified by users in their ‘Personal Page’ preferences. For example “My last posted reviews” can be coded to allow for users to decide how many of the last reviews they posted to display (ex. 5,10,15,20). This global will only display the users reviews.
It is also possible to have “Last posted reviews” display 5,10,15 or 20 of the last posted reviews regardless of the poster.
Depending on the type site you run, it can also include other globals to display completely different content that can be user-specific or just generally site specific. Should I say the limit is your imagination? :)

Each global can be positioned in a different place on the page. Depending on the layout, this could be the first, second or third one after each other or even first line left, first line right, second line left, second line right, etc.

Personalized Colours
Users can choose (technically via a simple font style sheet) what colour the fonts in the page are. Variations will allow for defining the colour of the fonts and hyperlinks, hover and visited status…

Personalized page layout
Via stylesheets, it is possible to not only define the colour of the images, background and text, but also the positioning of elements on the page. The first advantage is that while playing on the versatility offered by stylesheets, users get the real impression that they control the visual aspect of the page. The second advantage is that site owners can limit the amount of visual damage users can do. Giving too much control and too many options often means the pages look like a Christmas tree with so many different font colours and images. Using stylesheets means it’s possible to retain a certain amount of pre-configured harmony on the page.


Image of Personal Page preferences.
In order : 1) personalized welcome message. 2) Whether to activate globals or not, position on page of globals and number of links to be displayed by the global. 3) Colours of Fonts to be used on the personal page.
4) Image to be displayed in page header. 5) Overall CSS stylesheet to be used and hence colour of page and images displayed. 6) Whether to make page publicly available. 7) Save button.


Publicly Available Personal Page
Users can choose to have the pages publicly available or not by the click of a button. The mod_rewrite system means you could, for a user called jag, provide a personal url for their personal page that looks like this: http://www.mywebiste.com/personalpage/jag

Personal Introduction
Users can add a personal introduction about themselves, including both text and images. A user could add their photo and a text introducing themselves. As an option, administrators can have a validation system added that will allow them to review text and or text submitted in the same manner that review and link additions are handled by default. This allows site owners to make sure that illicit content isn’t published on their site without their knowledge.


Image of Introduction Page Creator.
In order, Name: 1) Change name that appears 2) Change Photo with image of present image used 3) Change introduction texts 4) Save / Cancel buttons


Personal Introduction : Contact Me option
By using Andy’s Contact Page plug-in you can have a personalized contact form that people can access by clicking on a button from your personal page.


Image of Contact Form.
In order 1) To: (with the name of the person) 2) Name of sender 3) Sender’s Email 4) Confirm Sender’s Email 5) Message



User options :
- Change which globals are displayed and the order in which they are displayed.
- Change text colour and page layout
- Add a personal introduction with text and or images
- Decide whether the page is publicly available with personal URL
- Option to add a link to a personal contact page (where their email isn’t displayed)


Admin options :
- Add globals and decide which values in the global can be personalized
- Through CSS code, define which colours and images can be changed
- With the additional user profile validation plug-in you can decide whether or not to publish a users introduction or modifications to their introductions

Requirements :
Gossamer Links 3.0.x (has also been tested with Links SQL 2.1+)
The user profile validation plug-in can be used in conjunction with Gossamer Community.

Price :
Personal Page Plug-in: 350 US dollars.
Personal Page Plug-in with admin validation: 500 US dollars.
Adding Personal Contact Page/Form: Contact Plug-in required ($25 from UltraNerds).

Support
Support for the Personal Page Plug-in and its optional admin validation addition is provided by Gossamer Threads.
Support for the Personal Contact Plug-In is provided as stated on the web site by Andy from UltraNerds.


Please don't hesitate to ask questions if there is anything you don't understand.
PS : As you can see from the screenshots the plug-in is completely customizable for other languages.

Thanks,
John
Significant Media
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Re: [Jag] Personal Page Plug-in In reply to
Hi Jag,

this sounds very interesting.......
As the screenshots within your forum-message are very small, would you please send me a PM with mentioning of the URL in order to be able to have a detailed look into this ?


Many thanks,

Erich
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Re: [erichcyber] Personal Page Plug-in In reply to
Hi,

Sorry was on holiday for a few days and got back late last night. Blush

I'm in the process of doing a english version of the my site. The live one will be in French. I'll let you know in a few days via PM when it's finalised. I'll let you test drive it to see if there are any big issues Wink

John
Significant Media
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Re: [Jag] Personal Page Plug-in In reply to
Good work - looks really nice!
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Re: [Hargreaves] Personal Page Plug-in In reply to
Hi,

Thanks Blush, I spent quite some time doing it, then more time converting as much as possible to CSS from tables. When visiting a friend this weekend, I found out however that Mac Internet Explorer 5.1 doesn't play the CSS game nicely. Anyway I'll plod on with the English version so that people can get a better feel for the system...

John
Significant Media
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Re: [Jag] Personal Page Plug-in In reply to
Hi Jag,

I am looking forward to receive your PM and have a look at it.
If I will buy it, I would translate it from english into the german language.


Best regards,

Erich
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Re: [Jag] Personal Page Plug-in In reply to
In Reply To:
When visiting a friend this weekend, I found out however that Mac Internet Explorer 5.1 doesn't play the CSS game nicely.
John, I wouldn't worry too much about that. Microsoft aren't supporting or developing IE on the Mac platform any more and many designers aren't even trying to accommodate the CSS quirks in IE 5 for Mac.

Hopefully this will be a good example of designers refusing to support a poor browser and forcing the users of that browser to change to something more up to date.

No doubt there are still some people stuck on old machines using system 9 etc. but they would be in the tiny minority (us Mac users are a minority as it is Wink).
Quote Reply
Re: [aus_dave] Personal Page Plug-in In reply to
Yes I just took a look at this article about the IE Mac issues :

http://www.l-c-n.com/IE5tests/

and this about the stats on IE Mac users (BBC homepage) :

http://www.currybet.net/...es/user_agents/5.php

that I had found on this site :

http://www.brucelawson.co.uk/...onditional-comments/

The issue I have with the above design in screenshots is that the page's content (to the left of the right hand side column and below the header) is in IE 5.1 for Mac on 0S 9 shunted right down the page near the bottom. Looks really weird Frown

It may be just a width issue but I'm not too sure ! Seems a pity not to investigate it but as you say, statistically it is a lot of work for so few users... Unimpressed

John
Significant Media
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Re: [Jag] Personal Page Plug-in In reply to
There are quite a few CSS hacks, but it is usually frustrating work getting IE Mac under control when it comes to CSS Unsure.
Quote Reply
Re: [aus_dave] Personal Page Plug-in In reply to
Hi,

I realised from some of the private messages about this plug-in that it may not have been clear enough that the plug-in was done by Gossamer Threads and you would be buying the plug-in from then, support also being provided by GT.

My role was in defining the requirements, testing and now being a simple (and happy Wink) Personal Page plug-in user. It is pretty obvious to me that without Virginia's hard and impressive work on this plug-in this project wouldn't have seen the day of light Smile.

Just thought I'd clarify this.

Thanks,

John
Significant Media
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Re: [Jag] Personal Page Plug-in In reply to
Hi,

Would you mind sending me a link to test this out too

thank you

Cheers
KevM
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Re: [KevM] Personal Page Plug-in In reply to
Hi KevM,

The easiest way for you to test the system as a user is to connect to Significant Media and create a user account, you will be able to see one of the ways it 'can' be used.
The specific url for creating an account (using GCommunity) is http://www.significant-media.com/community/account

There are options available to the admin on significant-media.com that are explained here : Personal Page & Blog plug-in. Let me know if you have any other queries about the admin-side of the plug-in.

Should you require any further details I will be happy to explain, if you have project specific details you could also drop me a private message.

Regards, John
Significant Media
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Re: [Jag] Personal Page Plug-in In reply to
The only thing that this plug-in is missing is a friends and buddies. (add a friend). Is that possibly an option?

- Jonathan
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Re: [Jag] Personal Page Plug-in In reply to
hello

I know this is a GT plug in, but is it for sale any where?
Regards
KaTaBd

Users plug In - Multi Search And Remote Search plug in - WebRing plug in - Muslims Directory
Quote Reply
Re: [jdgamble] Personal Page Plug-in In reply to
Hi Jonathan,

It think it would be pretty easy to implement. It would most probably need some interaction with either Links user tables or Community depending on how you have set-up the web-site so that you can check/verify the names added. It would be pretty straightforward without this though by just having an add me to your best friends list button on another user's page. This way the page would obviously use the person's login/handle and thus there would be little chance of error and hence little need for checking.

So depending on how you set it up you may not need to check the names added to a user specific field of friends. You may however want a global to sort the names by add-date, alphabetical etc. order

There could also be a mini (gravatar type) image of the person if say you are using Andy's Thumb Images to provide a normal size image of the user which has a thumb image created on upload.

Let me know if you want to discuss this further as I would be interested in adding this as a default function of the plug-in.

Cheers,

John
Significant Media

Last edited by:

Jag: Aug 6, 2006, 2:32 PM
Quote Reply
Re: [katabd] Personal Page Plug-in In reply to
Hi katabd,

At the bottom of the 'presentation page' there are 'pricing' details and I should maybe add a link to GT's purchase order form. People mainly contact me for details prior to purchasing the plugin so I hadn't put a direct link. But do contact GT or Jack directly if you don't require any further details.

And don't hesitate to contact me if I can help in any way :)

Cheers,

John
Significant Media
Quote Reply
Re: [Jag] Personal Page Plug-in In reply to
This seems like this should be a plugin for community, not for links. I'm interested in the personal image of a person, messaging, adding friends/viewing friends, commenting a person's profile, etc. Some of these options are already available through community and the forum. It seems to me it would not be hard to add a user's personal page option using the fields in community (although time is money). Excluding the easy to use layout options, what makes this software worth $350-525?

- Jonathan
Quote Reply
Re: [jdgamble] Personal Page Plug-in In reply to
Hi,

I think if you go over the examples in the presentation page you'll see that virtually all content is from GLinks. If you take the example on significant-media.com you can see that the plug-in is used for a 'personal page' and for a 'blog' type page. In each case all the information is from GLinks.

I can understand why you think of community but it's the word rather than the application that makes you think that. The plug-in is a very interesting tool for creating a community where people talk about and show other people in the community what they do and who they are. I suppose it can be compared to the MySpace type page to a certain extent. GCommunity here is just used as a single sign-on (SSO)

All the data that is displayed on the example pages above is from user specific tables in GLinks and not GCommunity including the user presentation page or about me page. Photos for example are not currently handled by GCommunity. The only instance I use GCommunity is for the name but that could be taken from GLinks as well.

I haven't really gone that much further with the plug-in yet but the examples above alone demonstrate how powerful it can be. In the above examples it is already used for both a user specific personal page and a user specific blog.
The fact that you can tailor globals to a specific user means that there is no limit to ways it can be used. You could envisage having a global that picked the persons last posts from a forum. You could have a global that picked up the persons last emails if you also use GMail. You could let users upload their own sounds/music/video to share with the community. There are other globals that could also be modified to a user specific version...

The difference between the two versions is due to a fairly complicated update that allows an admin to require text and images changes related to a user (the profile) to be stored (and not visible) until validated. Some sites may have younger visitors and need to restrict any illicit or illegal content from being published without their knowledge. There are advertisers that frown upon having illicit content appearing next to their adverts. This option is basically a safeguard for the admin of the site.

Cheers,

John
Significant Media

Last edited by:

Jag: Aug 6, 2006, 3:31 PM
Quote Reply
Re: [Jag] Personal Page Plug-in In reply to
The more I read about it, the more interesting it sounds. So the two main features that make the sofware worth the money are the changable globals, and the changable colors? Now is the blog you are talking about, more or less, a commenting system. Example, any user can comment at the bottom of a user page, similar to myspace or facebook, or tagworld? Does the blog have it's own page? So a user can upload photos and videos to share? Its there a photo type gallery for this kind of thing? Can each user message each other, or do you have to have GForum installed? Is the personal photo going to mess with GForum's personal photo? Can each user upload his or her own articles? What about featured users?

The reason I would think it would be a plugin for community and not for links is this: what if you want a perl based user communitiy (like myspace) that uses all of GT great backbone programming, but you don't want a directory site (not my case though). Is user review the only way it really ties in to GLinks?

As far as a buddy system, which I think would be a great feature... Maybe just a table called "buddies" with ID, user1, user2 as fields.. and just have a call for add both users to the db, delete would be easy, and an output sub routine that displays them with templates. Doesn't sound too difficult? Maybe an option to allow someone like Tom or Admin to automatically be your first friend, or you can start with no friends...

Sorry, I have been thinking about these kinds of things for a while, I have more questions, but lets start with those...

Thanks,

- Jonathan
Quote Reply
Re: [jdgamble] Personal Page Plug-in In reply to
Hi Jonathan

In Reply To:
So the two main features that make the sofware worth the money are the changable globals, and the changable colors?

The system does, as you say, allow you to create globals, with value(s) specified by the user
ex : my bookmarks, the user can define how many bookmarks to display and where the my bookmarks (template) will be displayed on the page and obviously whether to display their bookmarks at all on their page. In this example the user specific value is the number of bookmarks to be displayed.
On both significant-media.com examples I have a user specific font page style defined by a css file, a header defined by the user also a css file as well as a overall page style which is another css file.
Because you can pass user specific values I can also as you can see on this page create a user specific search query so that you can allow visitors to only search in the users posts/articles: Search 'in my articles'
Another example is that a user can create a flickr account and upload images there (which reduces your bandwidth usage) and as you can see in the sidebar display a flickr ‘badge’.


In Reply To:
Now is the blog you are talking about, more or less, a commenting system. Example, any user can comment at the bottom of a user page, similar to myspace or facebook, or tagworld? Does the blog have it's own page? So a user can upload photos and videos to share? Its there a photo type gallery for this kind of thing?

The blog is actually just GLinks, the link.html template is used to summarise a post and the detailed.html template is used to present the whole article. Then using the review system in GLinks people can post comments. The blog is a specific page unique to each user. You can let users upload files that could be music, photos, video etc. As I explained I preferred to link to flickr for the gallery system but you could allow users to upload multiple photos. If you use say Andy’s Thumb Images you could have a thumb on the user’s page and code a link to the normal size photo.


In Reply To:
Can each user message each other, or do you have to have GForum installed? Is the personal photo going to mess with GForum's personal photo? Can each user upload his or her own articles? What about featured users?

I went for a simple solution here in that I use Andy’s Contact Page that allows users to say whether they want to be contacted or not and then displays a contact form (without showing the members email even in the html source code) for people to contact them like this example here. It also allows visitors to contact members. I just have a button on each user's page that they can activate or deactivate and links to this type of contact page.
The personal photo is from GLinks since GCommunity doesn’t handle images currently. Based upon the above I allow users to access the browser.cgi system so that they can create their own articles/posts that then appear in the blog page and/or blog page. It is pretty simple to create a global that displays a list of users, but if I understand you correctly there isn’t a system that puts one user ahead of another but it may be easier to just list specific users to display first.

In Reply To:
The reason I would think it would be a plugin for community and not for links is this: what if you want a perl based user communitiy (like myspace) that uses all of GT great backbone programming, but you don't want a directory site (not my case though). Is user review the only way it really ties in to GLinks?

I my opinion the significant-media.com site shows how GLinks can be used to create a magazine, blog or a cross between the two. This is an example of an article with comments at the end as you can see. As explained above the system ties into links and the comments (reviews) posted about the links.

In Reply To:
As far as a buddy system, which I think would be a great feature... Maybe just a table called "buddies" with ID, user1, user2 as fields.. and just have a call for add both users to the db, delete would be easy, and an output sub routine that displays them with templates. Doesn't sound too difficult? Maybe an option to allow someone like Tom or Admin to automatically be your first friend, or you can start with no friends...

The more I think about the buddy system the simpler it seems it would be to implement. If you have a button on a user’s page that another clicks on to add them as a ‘friend’ then you could just have a friend/buddy field that the username gets added to and then you would just pull the names from that list in order to show someone’s friend(s). You could have an initial default value added to the field.

Hope this helps,

Cheers,

John
Significant Media

Last edited by:

Jag: Aug 6, 2006, 7:07 PM
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Re: [Jag] Personal Page Plug-in In reply to
Fewww. Looked like you put some work in that last comment. Smile

I think I understand the gist of it <-- is that how u spell gist, i dunno...

Few more simple questions... (Sorry to be redundant)

It is available now or is there just a few more tweaks to be handled?

Is this bookmark feature for bookmarking user pages (new feature), or is it just Links bookmark system modified?

---------

I'm curious on this buddy system thing. Are you saying you would create a new field in the user db called friends, and just store them separated by commas?

I would think there would be a slow problem if that one field value got to big. I was thinking creating a new table called friends, and storing them in (User1, User2 -fields) records. Then searching both columns for the current user and returning the friends.

What do you think?

- Jonathan
Quote Reply
Re: [jdgamble] Personal Page Plug-in In reply to
In Reply To:
It is available now or is there just a few more tweaks to be handled?
The plug-in is fully functional and the tweaks if any would rather be to add functions like the discussed buddy-list function. There are several sites currently using it. It is also, as previously stated, is straight-forward to use this with foreign languages and/or change error messages through the admin panel.

In Reply To:
Is this bookmark feature for bookmarking user pages (new feature), or is it just Links bookmark system modified?
This uses the current GLinks 3.x bookmark systems just pulling people’s bookmarks on a user specific basis and the user can define how many to display and where to display it on the page or not at all like all user specific globals.

I also thought it would be interesting to explain that a user can decide whether or not to allow the page to be publicly available or not. Furthermore, with code I provide in the plug-in help file, a link can be created on comments and articles that redirects to the user’s page. This is a nice gimmick to get people involved and motivates them to create a personal page. You can see an example of a link on a comment here

In Reply To:
I'm curious on this buddy system thing. Are you saying you would create a new field in the user db called friends, and just store them separated by commas?

I would think there would be a slow problem if that one field value got to big. I was thinking creating a new table called friends, and storing them in (User1, User2 -fields) records. Then searching both columns for the current user and returning the friends.

This may possibly be a better solution. I hadn't really thought of the specifics but was in effect just thinking of comma separated values in a field. I admit I often rely upon the savvy GT programmers like Virginia to advise on the best and most scalable solution which leads to first class solutions like this plug-in. It’s a good remark though since a large web site could easily clock up thousands of friends for popular people ! I’ll get back to you on the database part to give you a precise response.


Cheers,

John
Significant Media

Last edited by:

Jag: Aug 7, 2006, 7:24 AM
Quote Reply
Re: [Jag] Personal Page Plug-in In reply to
In Reply To:
I also thought it would be interesting to explain that a user can decide whether or not to allow the page to be publicly available or not. Furthermore, with code I provide in the plug-in help file, a link can be created on comments and articles that redirects to the user’s page. This is a nice gimmick to get people involved and motivates them to create a personal page. You can see an example of a link on a comment here[/quote]

I think this would be interesting. It could also go along with the buddy idea. Maybe a user could only have his profile available to people he has declared as friends...

In Reply To:

This may possibly be a better solution. I hadn't really thought of the specifics but was in effect just thinking of comma separated values in a field. I admit I often rely upon the savvy GT programmers like Virginia to advise on the best and most scalable solution which leads to first class solutions like this plug-in. It’s a good remark though since a large web site could easily clock up thousands of friends for popular people ! I’ll get back to you on the database part to give you a precise response.[/quote]

Yeah do that please. As soon as I get a few things together on my website, I will probably purchase this plugin.

Thanks,

- Jonathan
Quote Reply
Re: [jdgamble] Personal Page Plug-in In reply to
Hi,

Following some thought and a discussion with Virginia on the buddy list idea, it seems that there would need to be a fair amount of work done in order to provide a sound solution.
For example, some of the requirements would be authorisation, notification and removal.
I have sent a PM to jdgamble about this and I'm also not sure whether anyone else is interested in this type of functionality.

Cheers,

John
Significant Media