One of my clients wants to open their site to user-generated content to keep the site fresh and to encourage participaton. The site is for an island, and they want to use it both to attract people to the island, and to allow the people of the island to use it for their own online social community.

1) They want the main driver for the site to be Events - i.e. such and such is happening at this location between start date and end date.
2) They want any registered member to be able to add Events
3) Any registered member can add photos, videos, comments etc etc to any Event
4) Any registerd member can add Groups
5) Groups will also act as a repository for document uploads
6) They don't want to include a Forum

AS has all of the ingredients for this type of site, but I'm not sure how extendable it will be from my perspective as a developer.

I was thinking of using AF (using the Blog templates) as the Events listing because of the way AF can handle all of the peripheral data (photos, videos, comments) per post. It won't strictly be a forum though.

I haven't fully tested the AS Events yet.

The page where the single Event is located would need to have the capability to be extended. In other words I'd need to be able to add other modules to this page to show: photos per event; videos per event; anything else in the future per event.

Would I be able to configure AS to give me this kind of structure? My own feeling is that the Events Detail screen would need to be an actual Tab with a listener for EventId. This would allow me to show anything on that page per Event.

Any input/ideas most welcome.

Perhaps you could just rename the groups tab to 'Events' in the menu and in profileview.ascx and then have the group name be the title of the event? Then people could 'join' that event and add photos and vids that way.

Thanks Will - good idea.

I guess that will allow further extension because of the way the Group Details are on a separate TabId. I could therefore add my own custom modules to show anything relating to that GroupId in separate modules on the Group details page. The Group photos could handle the photos and maybe I could hook in UMG for videos.

This would also expose the forums to Groups - even though the client doesn't want forums, I think the Blog templates would disguise the fact that it's actually a forum.

The client would also require that the Latest Activity view/river would include updates from any associated modules. In other words, if user X adds a new video to Group Y, it would need to be in the view. I don't know if the Recent Activity view is going to be extended to include updates from other modules.

Will M - is this looking like it could all hold together?

Posted By Steve White on 09 Nov 2009 09:11 AM
Thanks Will - good idea.


This would also expose the forums to Groups - even though the client doesn't want forums, I think the Blog templates would disguise the fact that it's actually a forum.

The client would also require that the Latest Activity view/river would include updates from any associated modules. In other words, if user X adds a new video to Group Y, it would need to be in the view. I don't know if the Recent Activity view is going to be extended to include updates from other modules.

You don't need to implement forums at all within a group.  But, I think Will's suggestions would open up the idea of a blog (forum)....with the upcoming AF release, this could also present as Q & A within an "event" (group).

The journal doesn't have an API yet, but my understanding is that it will shortly.  I think many of us would like to inject actions into the journal feed.

Comments and photos for events is possible with AS 1.3.

The event detail view has been completely revised for 1.3. It has the option for tabs and follows our standard template structure. I might be able to post some screen shots later today. It does sound like Active Social can handle everything for you with the exception for videos.

Thanks Steven/Will.

I'm going to have to wait for the next release of AF/AS and try to get this all worked out.

Will M - if the Events detail view follows your standard template structure, does it mean that other 3rd party modules can be added to tabs within the Events detail view? This would allow me to try to use UVG with the EventId, and indeed other data sources per EventId.

I haven't tried to integrate UVG inside an AS tab before, but I know others have succeeded, so that would be something that would seem to work with my clients requirements.

Can you put a custom 3rd party tab on a group page too? I have not tried.

Here is the new detail view for Events

I like the flex2 feel of that as well...

Posted By Travis Crittenden on 12 Nov 2009 11:59 AM
I like the flex2 feel of that as well...

With the revised template/themes in Active Social 1.3 it should now pick up the design from any DNN skin.  We still have a few specific css items, but we have tried to keep them mostly neutral.