Safe Speed Forums

Paul,

Have you thought about speaking to Ted over at Pistonheads? He has a script that integrates with their forum that auto-generates a thread from a news story as soon as the first comment is posted.

It would save you having to generate the threads manually each time you add a page to your site.

Just a thought.

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Carl Prescott

Hi Carl,

Thanks. New pages are no problem at all. It's mainly the changes to the existing Safe Speed web pages that's taking the time. There's no short cut really. It's a labour intensive job that has to be done just the once. I'm also linking older pages to newer material as I go. I guess another 30 hours or so will get the job done, and I'm happy with that.

I'm also doing a full revamp of the "claims" section with full forum integration. that'll take 30 or 40 hours too. But it's all going to be well worth it.

Once done, some of the work I've long been doing dealing with visitor queries and comments will no longer be necessary. That's the bonus. I suppose the forums will demand my attention to messages as a balancing negative, but at least other folk will be able to help me out with simple queries and so on.

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Paul Smith
Our scrap speed cameras petition got over 28,000 sigs
The Safe Speed campaign demands a return to intelligent road safety

Re-write the whole site in PHP with a MySQL database, and your own propietary forums that integrate tightly with each page... Should only take you till about 2015.. Maybe the safe speed message will have got through by then?

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-mike[F]
Caught in the rush of the crowd, lost in a wall of sound..

Only if you really suck at coding! Reckon you could stick a CMS in and integrate with the forums within a couple of weeks if you had a reasonable amount of spare time. Easily within a month or six weeks if you worked on it whenever you had some free time.

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Carl Prescott

I have yet to experience a CMS (Content Management System) that works well with disparate subject matter. They are all very well when the content is "product data sheets" or whatever. The usual biggest failure is in interlinking, followed closely by inadequate searching and inadequate indexes. I appreciate that it is technically possible to do the job well.

Then there's the very large problem of getting folk to read important content that they might not guess is present. Take the Safe Speed (Tiger) page. Would anyone ever find it in a CMS?

So don't expect Safe Speed to go "CMS" anytime soon.

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Paul Smith
Our scrap speed cameras petition got over 28,000 sigs
The Safe Speed campaign demands a return to intelligent road safety

There are good CMS systems out there though - monkeyCMS being a good case in point. See www.dvdtimes.co.uk or www.cdtimes.co.uk for examples of it in place.

Not that I'm criticising what you have in place Paul, works relatively fine for now, but I think it could get out of hand as the site grows and you'll find managing hundreds of hard-coded HTML pages will take up more and more of your time...

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Carl Prescott

Those two are very impressive, but there's big expensive programming behind them. Do you know if it's an adaptable general package, or if they are bespoke? Obviously they are very similar, but then I guess they are similar with the same publisher.

What happens when dumber search robots come visiting?

You're right that maintaining older content is a pain, but it's (pure guess) under 1% of my time at present with about 160 pages on the web site.

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Paul Smith
Our scrap speed cameras petition got over 28,000 sigs
The Safe Speed campaign demands a return to intelligent road safety

It's completely customisable.

Colin who runs both of the above sites is writing it as a customisable solution, and is using his two main websites as a demonstration platform for what it can do. Supposedly, you should be able to set up a site like DVD Times with no programming experience - though obviously someone would need to do all of the design.

The main page for the system is here and shows the progress as it goes along. I've no idea what the final release date is, or what sort of money you'd be looking at to put it in, but I can speak to Col if you want - he's a good friend of mine (I worked on DVD Times for years).

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Carl Prescott

Yes, please do have a chat. Let me know progress. Safe Speed it totally unsuitable as a beta site - I just dont have time for that - but it might be an interesting route forward. I really did like what I saw on the DVDTimes site. Thanks.

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Paul Smith
Our scrap speed cameras petition got over 28,000 sigs
The Safe Speed campaign demands a return to intelligent road safety

I've spoken with him briefly regarding this and he's going to knock together a demo site that you can play with. This should give you access to the back-end, so you can see how the site is put together from that point of view.

I guess the best way from here on in is via e-mail? As soon as I get details of the demo site from Col, I'll forward them on to you and you can have a play and see what you think.

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Carl Prescott

Yes please. Email. Thanks.

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Paul Smith
Our scrap speed cameras petition got over 28,000 sigs
The Safe Speed campaign demands a return to intelligent road safety