A new software platform for TalkPhysics?

Just to let everyone know that over the next couple of months we’ll be looking at possible new software for TalkPhysics.

The existing system is Elgg, with heavy customisation by four different contractors over the last two years. It’s now in a state where any further development is very expensive. Instead, we’re concentrating on looking at more up-to-date software, such as Drupal.

At the moment, we know that TalkPhysics is largely meeting its aims, so we’re not looking for anything drastically different – really just asking for what we’d have wanted two years ago if we knew then what we know now!

The requirements we’ve drafted include key suggestions made by TalkPhysics’s users, such as getting tagging working, improving searching, logging in using email address rather than username, and being able to easily post from smartphones.

So, watch this space – we should have identified a successor system by December, possibly launching it before next Summer.

logging in using email address rather than username

 

could this be an either/or ? my username is significantly shorter than my email address.

 

Good plan on the whole, though, thanks!

sounds good, likes/thumbs up buttons would be useful

some techy people I know are quite excited about https://joindiaspora.com/ not sure if its what your looking for but meant to be opensource alternative to rival facebook/google+ (i.e. won’t harvest and sell your details/activity to big business)

Hi – hopefully with the “remember me”, it won’t matter much that your email address is longer, and it would save us some complexity. We’ve already noted that several users want to ensure they can remain logged in to several different PCs simultaneously. And we’ve already included a Digg It!-style “this was useful” requirement and, related to that, a way of giving users status, so those who contribute a lot are recognised as such.

Oh, and I could have mentioned that we’re looking at the possibility of moving to the same software for both MyIOP and TalkPhysics. At the moment, MyIOP runs on Small World Labs (SWL). We may well end up running two different instances (i.e. we wouldn’t use the same underlying database), but at least it would simplify support for the two sites.

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