(Health warning: this post is very boring...)

The last couple of weeks, and this weekend especially, have been a geeky code-pushing time for me as I try to cram in some much-needed site development.

I've finally turned on the tagging system, which lets you find blog entries, web pages, news articles and members by keywords, and I've been working for the last couple of days to tidy up the code that creates peoples' public profiles so I'm ready to start writing the tabs code (which lets you see all the content a member has created on UPSU.net). I've also just finished working my way through the 5,000-ish-lines of code that make up the UPSU Groups system, ready to incorporate group management into the site.

I'm going to ramble on a bit about each of these three features, because they're quite important to how UPSU.net is going to grow as a community site over the next 12 months. I hope...!

Tagging

The tagging system has been in development for over a year now, and it's more-or-less finished, bar a couple of bugs that mean some results don't show up when they should.

"Tagging" is a way of adding keywords to your content - blog entries, web pages, news articles, your profile, and photos, to let other people search for your content - and everyone's content - about a particular "thing". For example, this blog entry is tagged with "development", and you can find other blog entries by me about development by clicking the tag link at the top of this blog entry.

This also means you can search for other members of UPSU.net by their interests, and once the new profile pages have been finished, this should make a lot more sense.

The best thing about the tagging system, though, are tag clouds, which graphically represent the top 100, 200, or however many tags which are the most popular in a given area. You can see what I mean by taking a look at the tags homepage.

One other benefit of this is how the tagging system works with blogs: your blog's web address is something like "upsu.net/blogs/johnsmith". If you tag a few blog entries with "football", you can find a list of all these blog entries at "upsu.net/blogs/johnsmith/football", and a miniature tag cloud - the top 15-or-so tags used in the blog you're viewing - is shown on the right of every blog page belonging to that author.

I've also tried to make it as easy as possible to tag blog entries - you simply have to type a new tag on each line in the "Tag this diary entry" box (when you write or edit your blog), and your tags can be more than one word, e.g. "top 40 chart tunes".

Anyone who's a member of UPSU.net can start a blog - just sign-in and go to upsu.net/profile/content/blogs to find out more.

• More information on the tags homepage.
  
  

Member profiles

Click to enlarge

Everyone who's a member of UPSU.net has a member's profile. This lists as much - or as little - about you as you like, and also lists your UPSU.net content, including your forum posts, any comments you've made (but you can still leave anonymous comments if you'd rather simply by logging out when you want to post a comment), your blog entries, and - coming in the near future - your UPSU.net friends and group memberships.

Your profile also has a "contact me" page which lists your contact details - if you've specifically said you want them to be visible - and, for signed-in members, an "e-mail me" form which sends an e-mail to you without the sender finding out your e-mail address, as well as a "my picture" page if you've uploaded a photo of yourself.

If you're a contributor on UPSU.net, you can also create web pages and news articles, and upload photo galleries - these will also be shown on your public profile so you'll have an easy way to find all the work you've done on the site.

This is quite a lot of content so, to make it easier to sift through it all, I've begin splitting the profile pages up into "tabs" of content. At the moment you'll probably only see the three that are working - "about me", "e-mail me" and "picture"; you can get a sneak preview of how things might look below:

• If you're signed in, you can see your public profile at upsu.net/profile/me, and you can update it at upsu.net/profile/update/about.
  
  

UPSU Groups

If you've used Facebook, you'll know what a group is in the social networking sense - something you can create and invite your friends to join, chat, and send messages, plus a few more things.

Well, I saw that and thought, "I want UPSU.net to be able to do that", so I've been working on the groups pages for a few months now. To be fair, UPSU.net needs to be able to have groups of members like this to allow the web team to allow a group of people control over various parts of the site without risking them having access to areas they shouldn't - for example the membership database - or running the risk of accidents resulting in the site being broken in some way.

Once I'm happy that the groups system is up and running properly, everyone who's a member of UPSU will be able to create groups, choose a category for them - for example "interests", "sports", "study groups", etc., and invite their friends to join the group.

Each group will also have a discussion board, and - I hope - a photo gallery where you'll be able to upload your pics.

What's important to remember about all this, though, is that I'm not trying to do what Facebook does - being able to offer these features to all members if very nice, but it's not the main reason for having a way of creating groups; the most important part of this feature is how it will let UPSU.net expand into a fully multi-user website, with lots of groups of people looking after their own areas, and being assigned varying roles and privileges to carry out the various jobs around the website.

This will also mean - I hope - that we will be able to completely administer the UPSU/NUS membership system from within the Mambo content management system that runs UPSU.net - at the moment, a lot of the administrative functions are handled by external scripts because that was the easiest way to make it work two years ago.

While you can see some of the front-end of the groups system at the moment, it's a long way from being finished. However, today marks the point where the groups management system is now fully integrated into the UPSU.net website. This is important because it means every area of UPSU.net - for example the forums, web pages, news streams and photo galleries - will be able to work out the privileges assigned to a member, meaning that actually making the site respect the access restrictions or privileges assigned to each member is now possible.

Anyway, that's more than enough rambling from me. This has, without doubt, been the most boring piece of writing I've ever proof-read, so I very much doubt there's going to be anyone reading this far down the page. In fact, I'm so sure that no-one's reading that I'll promise to buy a pint for the first 5 people to e-mail me when I next see them at the Union. How'saboutthatthen?

/al - off to meet the Uni directorate tomorrow. Oh yeay... ;o)