Building Community
We’ve made further progress with our VBulletin/PhotoPost bulletin boards. The first alumni and faculty are logging into our alumni board, and we’ve quickly assembled a prototype of a board for all current community members. Each site is hosted at A Small Orange on $20 a month hosting plans.
I have a OES Community PDF example ready for download. What I like about this software is that it will at least give us a chance to have a multi-divisional place for photo galleries and discussions. We tweaked the code to combine the discussion forums and photo galleries on the same page, along with a block of random photos from the galleries.
For registration, there’s not an easy LDAP solution, but we were able to create an email domain “whitelist,” so that only people with OES email addresses can subscribe, and then confirm who they are by the email sent to their OES account. This should prevent outside people from registering, and keep us from having to approve every registration request. Since we provide parents with OES email addresses as well, it should work for them also.
The next step is to gather photo collections from the differing US Winterim trips, post the galleries, and then invite US students to register. The photos will be the first content worth logging in for, and we may or may not allow posting from students right off the bat.
EdTech | Jim Heynderickx April 11, 2006
I’ve had some requests for more details about the process of building these, and here’s one of my responses:
Our process was to look at all the bulletin board options, epecially those with integrated photogalleries. We felt that VBulletin was the most robust, and that the PhotoPost add-in would serve our purposes.
We read a lot of the pre-sales information at the forums at the Vbulletin and PhotoPost sites, and through those forums we decided that A Small Orange would be the most reliable, lower cost hosting solution.
We started the site http://www.oescommunity.net at A Small Orange first. We ran the “test scripts” to find out what level of PHP and MYSQL it provided. It checked out fine for VBulletin and PhotoPost, as recommended.
We then bought and downloaded a copy of VBulletin, and followed the directions for editing the install files and configurations. We created the database and user via the easy Control Panel tools that came with the Small Orange site. Then we FTP’ed all the VBulletin site files to the site. With some tweaking, we got the site running as a regular bulletin board.
Then we repeated this process with the PhotoPost software, except that it used the same database as VBulletin. We also spent a couple of days researching problems and tweaks to improve the integraiton of the site. This always wasn’t simple, since the install script pages didn’t work right and we had to manually set some configuration in the database for it to work right. There are great tools for this in the Control Panel that comes with the Small Orange site.
Then we started configuring user profiles, learning to upload files, deciding on size limits, etc. The “whitelist” tweak for allowed email domains was a big deal, but we found the solution at http://www.vbulletin.org, the official hack site for Vbulletin.
very exciting project. there really is no great all-in-one project. independent schools like ours love unique solutions.
we have been brainstorming like crazy trying to figure out a web to take our 1-way Intranet, our off-site hosted photo gallery (Shutterfly ProGal service), our CMS (Moodle), our webmail (Microsoft Exchange)and get them all into one, easy to access, single-signon web portal.
LDAP works great, but we need the sites to be tied in to each other visually without huge initial overhead on our part.
As for your LDAP problem, you may want to look into Moodle’s LDAP auth system. It is open source and PHP so you can do with it what you please.
I’ve heard of some interesting work done by universities for uniting multiple online resources into a single portal. I need to check my notes to remember what solution they were implementing.
In terms of VBulletin, it has some features for shared logins with other systems, and it’s interesting to see what ad-hoc developers are doing at http://www.vbulletin.org. I might try to track down some of their work to see if it could be extended to a Google or Exchange system.
Good luck!