v-s.net v0.6

Thursday, 10:16 am in Bloglife

Lately I keep getting this… idea for a project. The idea to run a multi-user blog site. You know, like LiveJournal? A mature, fandom-friendly community, like JournalFen I guess, but with a more open membership. Shockingly, don’t want to run it on the LJ Server; instead I’d want to use WordPress MU, simply because I think the codebase is better. LJ used pre-2000 technology and it creaks and it shows. I guess even WP is beginning to show its age a little – PHP is generally considered to be a “last generation” web language – but it’s still nicer than the LJ server is. Besides, I can hack PHP code in my sleep so upgrading features would be, theoretically, easy.

So. WordPress MU. A heavily customised WordPress MU, of course, because my target market is used to a bunch of features they’re not likely to give up. This is only a really sketchy idea at the moment, but I guess my wishlist would be something like:

• Fandom-friendly.
• “Mature”. I’m not sure what I’d mean by this. 18 years and over only? 15? No very young kids, but I don’t think I’d want to shut out teenagers, either.
• A feature similar to LJ’s Communities. I think this can be duplicated with BuddyPress’s Groups, but I’d need to check it out.
• Some kind of interoperability with LiveJournal; I know people find it hard to leave.
• Avatars. Multiple avatars?
• Threaded comments with reply notifications. I think this would need to be custom-written, since I’m not sure there’s an existing WP plug-in that duplicates LJ’s system exactly.
• F-lists.
• The ability to f-lock entries. I know this one is critical for a lot of people, and WP traditionally doesn’t handle it well. I think this would be another custom system. Like the threaded comments thing, I’ve theoretically written one of these before (in sk.log), jsut not as a plug-in…
• Media upload space? Space and bandwidth is pretty cheap nowadays, right? Er…
• Free and ad-free. Of course, bandwidth and space don’t grown on trees, so an increased user-based would probably necessitate some kind of tiered payment model. Again, not sure how WPMU handles portioning of features, so…
• Customisable. Everyone loves a theme, right? Another feature I’m not sure how WPMU handles.

So, yeah. That’s what I’m thinking. I’ve created a short survey to collect input from users on the project, so I’d be tremendously appreciative if you could take a moment to fill it out. And, yanno, spread the word I guess.

Hrm…

Edit

So about ten minutes after posting this, I see the announcement from synecdochic about Dreamwidth. I dream in Zeitgeist, it seems. Still, I like the idea of this project and I have my reservations about any attempts to tart up the LJ Server. So, let’s get dabbling…

• Tags » input, projects, todo
• Comments By » Pingback
• Mood » contemplative