Valerian

Today I logged into the Knowledge Trails site and saw that one of the personas made a blog post. A persona that went by the name of Valerian. I didnt add this person and I have yet to find out whether Adrian added this user. It would’ve been fine if Adrian added him/her but this started to concern me (while waiting for a reply from Adrian).

The fact that this person could join this closed community so easily doesnt say very much about the security protecting the site. It is so easy for any random person register and start creating data, which may not be grounded in expertise (which is the least of my worries at this point). At the start, the only thing you need to have functioning is an email address. As soon as you have that, you just have to plug in some random details (username & password), click on the links that get sent to your email and voila, you’re in!

Not anymore tho =D After worrying about how just anyone can register and wreak havoc on the site, I decided to finally look for a plugin that gives administrators the power to control who can access the closed site. The plugin is called Site Access (for obvious reasons) and it seems like it’s really doing it’s job. I created another account to test its usability. With this plugin, anyone can still simply register the same way (by clicking the Register button, plugging in details then validating their email account) but they cant actually access the site unless an administrator approves and activates the user. Much better for security of the site, in my opinion =D

Updating the live site

I’ve only just gotten around to making updates on knowledge trails and progress is really slow. It doesnt help that my drop-down ‘Tools’ tool bar doesnt really work (I dont know why it doesnt work now when it used to). Well, I’ve asked Adrian about it, I just need to wait for a reply now. I’ve made updates to the Terms and Privacy external pages using content from the elgg site. It’s pretty similar and contains shareable content so why not right ?

I’ve been trying to sort out the User Generated content plugin (for forms) but I seem to have quite a bit of problems getting it in the mods file exactly the way the plugins author specifies. I guess I’ll just have to try again a bit later. So far, I’ve gotten rid of the spotlight section that one plagued the site. I had to download a plugin just to erase the whole section. I figured that would be an easier option, rather than having me muck about with the core codes, messing up then later having to retrace my steps to see where I went wrong.

I also downloaded plugins to insert a tag cloud and a task list onto the knowledge trails site, after all, tags are important as a search function and we all like making lists yea ?

Anyways, I should be uploading the rest of the personas soon. It seems that Chris is quite lonely, what with only 2 other admins on the whole site, and I’ve only recently befriended him.

Business Requirements Evaluation

I’ve been doing my Business Requirements Evaluation and I’ve come across a few problems that I’ve had problems getting around.

With Elgg, when you’re a new user, and you’ve signed up and everything, the first thing you have to do is configure your dashboard. I’d like to get around this and make everything fixed like it is in other Social Network Sites. I dont want to give the user a choice of what is available on the dashboard – just in case they choose not to have anything at all on their dashboard, which would totally defeat the purpose of joining the SNS because it would mean that the user isn’t willing to communicate with other users.

This is the page that a user would get when he/she is new to the site.

You can see here that the user is allowed to choose from the list on the right hand side of the page the widgets he/she would like to arrange around the page.

Another problem would be that I’ve enabled a plugin that allows users to embed videos into their posts but I cant seem to locate where in the site I’m able to upload videos. The places where the site allows me to embed media does nothing when I try to embed an .mp4 file.

Anyways, I’ve finally fished my Evaluation. All 17 pages of it and it’s still not the final copy. I’ve come across some parts where I’m not sure if I’ve answered correctly and other parts where I just completely dont know how to respond to. I guess we’ll see how good my work is tomorrow at the meeting. I hope it isnt totally bad. :S