Hard launch: 31.1.09 - to all members of LS mailing lists, general public, media

• Putting in the union name and country should be part of the online signup
• Fix problem of 'x' appearing instead of labour photo of the year once you've logged in
• Fix what's causing crash when displaying one of the last pages in 'everybody' - it's some user details, but I can't tell which one is wrong
• Improve the dashboard display - see John Wood's comments
• Don't use the term 'users' - use 'people' instead
• The union name should appear together with the person's user name everywhere
• Some users - not all - have languages; this needs to be sorted for all perhaps with a default language for each user
• Mailings to members of groups - may come with a later version of Elgg
• Embedding video - may come with a later version of Elgg
• Emails sent by the system need to correctly deal with spaces in user names and names of groups
• Improve speed and efficiency with cacheing, etc.
• Why does UnionBook crash Blackberries?
• Fix start date for users which is now 1970.
• Are the initial validation emails coming from unionbook@labourstart.org or is there a problem as some people have reported?
• Why does this not work well in Opera? Or Safari?
• Create a legal disclaimer text, set up terms and conditions for users, and a mechanism to report offensive content to a team (not just to me).
• Make a list of what features Facebook has that we found particularly useful and try to replicate (or ask ELGG to create for us)
• Fix display to make sure all one's friends are shown.
• When creating pages, formatting doesn't always seem to work - italics did not work in the latest page I created.
• Groups - figure out how people are invited, how they join, how their membership is confirmed.
• Add an explicit link back to the Home page (dashboard) everywhere.
• Upgrade our server - the current configuration is probably not powerful enough.
• Test alternate theme setup by John Wood.
• Deal w problem faced by 'Antony McMullen' who was told his name contained illegal characters (?).

To fix - someday:

1. Other languages - draft people to check and fix each language, each module - one at a time
2. Create a system to mirror the site in case it crashes.
3. Sort out ownership of unionbook.org, making sure LabourStart will always have access to this.
4. In email, allow users to send one-line messages without subjects.
5. Look at existing ELGG sites and get some more good ideas.
6. Innovative uses to explore: move LabourStartJobs.org here; create a Singles group
7. An events module would be useful.

I think that's not quite good enough. Think of using the Windows (argh, I said it) OS to add a printer to your PC. Whenever you open the printers dialog box there is an icon in the list of printers which is called 'add a printer'. I want that whenever I list the groups on UB there is one at the end (or the beginning, which would be better) called 'create a group', which is not a group, but a link to the group creation form.

Oh, and the groups_extended plugin might provide the basis for the heirarchical group structure we want. It clearly doesn't do it now, but they've done the hard work of coding up how to extend the group structure to include a 'category' for it. If we can extend it further to allow for parent-child relationships then vanya's your uncle.

I am using a BlackBerry Bold and the site comes up very well but takes time to upload all of the images.  There are some other minor glitches but I think these are related to the site being still in development mode.

The site also seems to be working on the iPhone.  These are the only smart phones that I have access to at the moment, so I can't confirm how it works on other types of smart phones.

Since Kevin wrote the flexprofile and the form plugins, doing this work should be quick and simple for him, and therefore cost-effective for us. He might also be persuaded that it's "good for elgg" and therefore offer us a discount rate. Presumably we'd be happy to see the plugin made available to other elgg users once it's written.

Number 2 is dependent on how we fix number 1. If the flexprofile plugin is used, there's a logic then to how we get additional fields from the profile to display elsewhere in the site. Kevin could advise best on that, I think.

Similarly, number 5 looks like it should be easy. Take the mass_mailout plugin, and fine-tune it so that it only sends to a specific group. Call it group_mailout, and there you go. Probably don't need to pay an elgg developer for that.

And there are several existing plugins tailored to embedding video. So this doesn't need to be on the 'pay for' list. They won't be perfect, but they're available.

Details here:

http://community.elgg.org/pg/plugins/octazen/read/11949/octazen-address-book-contacts-importer-inviteafriend-plugin

$users = get_entities('user', '', '');
$content .= '<p>This site has ' . count($users) . ' registered users.</p>';

1466   /**
1467    * Return entities matching a given query, or the number thereof
1468    *
1469    * @param string $type The type of entity (eg "user", "object" etc)
1470    * @param string $subtype The arbitrary subtype of the entity
1471    * @param int $owner_guid The GUID of the owning user
1472    * @param string $order_by The field to order by; by default, time_created desc
1473    * @param int $limit The number of entities to return; 10 by default
1474    * @param int $offset The indexing offset, 0 by default
1475    * @param boolean $count Set to true to get a count rather than the entities themselves (limits and offsets don't apply in this context). Defaults to false.
1476    * @param int $site_guid The site to get entities for. Leave as 0 (default) for the current site; -1 for all sites.
1477    * @param int|array $container_guid The container or containers to get entities from (default: all containers).
1478    * @return array A list of entities.
1479    */
1480   function get_entities($type = "", $subtype = "", $owner_guid = 0, $order_by = "", $limit = 10, $offset = 0, $count = false, $site_guid = 0, $container_guid = null)

The upshot of this is you want to call the get_entities function like this:

get_entities('user', '', '', '', '', TRUE);

That should do the trick.

get_entities('user', '', '', '', '', '', TRUE);

The $count argument, set here to TRUE, is the 7th argument.

.

I'm still seeing formatting problems at the bottom of each page.  The 'More Information' bit and the Act NOW! box are being overwritten by the lower page menu.

Under the UnionBook graphic at the top of the page I see a small box with an 'x' in it, meaning there's a graphic not displaying properly...

:( 

I halfway fixed this for the stuff I did on the other theme, but then got another problem. I put a check for login on it, so it only displayed piccy if you were logged in.

now that's good for people logging in, who no longer see the X (IE only - firefox happy), but people looking at public pages whilst not logged in see the photo now on all public pages. Not sure what's worse....

Not sure if we want this? Will people *HAVE* to declare they're in a particular union? If so, you'll get many who want to have 2 or 3 spaces to list all their unions. (we did with the facebook app we made)