After months of development on this site, and months of planning... i'm now very aware of the problems a "profile" kind of site can have. The thing is, to get the full use out of this site... may mean destroying CP!!! Let me explain.
CP is supposed to be about profiles correct? So what the hell is a forum doing here? And yet the forum is very active. If i add projects and want to allow multiple developers... who gets it on their profile and whats the main project URL? With a project URL it's then taking the focus off coder profiles! If i allow software buyers to post projects... then that introduces another type of account... if they register as coders... then those accounts aren't of the correct nature in effect diluting the quality of the coder accounts. If i add pastebins which many coders use, they tend to add low quality codes to profiles that are of very little use to anyone other than the person they were intended for. There are loads more such problems. To correct that problem... i've registered quite a few domain names. Two of which are; coderid.com and codersocial.com
CoderID.com is where your account is... then it allows other sites to access it's API's to process a login meaning you only have to register ONCE and your photo, avatar, skills, and a few other basic details are in ONE location. CoderSocial.com will be taking the forum off CP and adding a chat room, IM, shoutboxes, etc... everything coders need to socialize with each other... I own coderarticle.com where you guys will post articles... etc... in the end... CoderProfile doesn't really have anything? Since coderID is composed automatically from all your entries in the other sites. meaning what is there left for CP to do??? Each site in the network queries CoderID.com for the sites you use... and automatically lists those sites in the profile panel... so you can jump from one site to another VERY easily.
At the moment all i can think of is to use it as an alias of coderid.com for example if you type coderprofile.com/coder/VBAssassin it goes to coderid.com/coder/VBAssassin... but i prefer the coderprofile.com domain to coderid.com...
Of course not... it's like saying google.com can't do everything (gmail, google analytics, adwords, adsense, etc)... but actually go to google.com and all it does is "search"......
I could put games on here, i could do loads of things... but just because i can doesn't mean i "should". Like i said in the first post... things clash with the main focus of this site. The forum in fact clashes loads which is why i'm going to move it to CoderSocial.com in the future. Why does it clash? Networks collect all the information from profiles and let people search all that data... however... putting the forum in the networks area is not really the correct place for it to be... neither is the site area because the site area is supposed to be for stuff specific to the site itself... but the forum has members chatting on it. So the forum doesn't technically fit anywhere... secondly... when you add stuff to your profiles... you add them directly such as a source code or an article... with the forum you don't.... you actually go to the network and post topics etc directly. There's a few other things that are technically "wrong" as well which are bugging me.
My suggestion would be to only split the forums, and add subdomains for the rest of the networks.
And I think to get more focus on the actual profiles, adding new features for the profiles would do that, besides, if one likes some stuff from a user, they are quite likely to check out their profile...
Each site in the network will in effect be a page of your profile. The best way for me to explain this is probably to show you. Give me a day or two and i will try and explain this much clearer.
Here is an example anyway:
CoderID.com
You register your account here... and this is where all your PM's and Notifications can be read (as well as on the individual sites)
CoderTutorial.com
You can write multi page tutorials...
CoderArticle.com
You can write articles...
CoderBookmark.com
Social bookmarking! You also get to add a little firefox pluggin that helps you with it all as you browse the net.
CoderBookshelf.com
Add coding books you own and discover books you may be interested in based on other coders bookshelves.
CoderForge.com
Full project management for multiple developers and 1 single point for a project eg: coderforge.com/project/17/title-of-project
So how does this all work... because each site in the network talks to CoderID.com it knows exactly which sites in the network you use. This is distributed to each version of your profile on each site in the network. This then allows visitors to easily jump between pages of your profile even though each "section" may be hosted on separate sites. It also means that if you have NO interest in say 5 of the sites... you simply don't use them and you wont even know they are there which means... i can keep each sites interface very specific and to the point without messing it up with loads of crap that not everyone is interested in. It also means i can litterally create unlimited sites for your profiles... and in the distant future... allow you guys to create your own sites for your profiles via API's (which will already be implemented, just to start with not on a public basis).
Lets say you only use CoderForge, CoderTutorial and CoderCodes... then you will simply get 3 links in your profile panel saying:
Projects,
Source Codes,
Tutorials
if your not interested in say socializing with other coders (chat rooms, IM, forums, shout boxes, etc)... you simply don't use codersocial.com...
Which is why all the "official" sites will use the same engine. So the layouts will be the same, coders will be the same across sites, if you login to one site you auto login to the other sites (so jumping between sites will not be awkward). Also, this solves 99% of the problems i currently have on CP and if i don't address them now, they will only get worse (pragmatic programmer).
Your profiles will also look the same throughout the sites... and your URLs will be the same (except for the domain of course).
Sub domains i did think about... but then decided against it for a few reasons.
The more i plan this out (i have about 100 pages of planning so far) the more it seems viable, but i must do it NOW rather than later as the longer i leave it the harder it will be to do).
Advantages of this network:
APIs to easily expand with
Central ID, means a username will be the same person on every site.
Rather than one big monster of a site that's hard to scale and develop... each site in the network is its own partition and deals with scalability in its own way
Entire feature sets can be 100% encapsulated from others.
Any kind of site for coders can be created and just as easily removed as it can be added. To uninstall a site from the network... simply click delete site.
A profile automatically generates throughout each site you use... if you send a link to someone related to your codes simply give them: codercodes.com/coder/VBAssassin or maybe you want them to see your articles... coderarticle.com/coder/VBAssassin
They all run off the same set of classes (engine) so updating them all is easy.
Search engines will love the fact the domain name is so relevant to the content.
No need for the whole "application" based way of building your profiles.
I can add new sites to the network when there ready to be added with next to no modifications to the rest of the network as the profiles dynamically expand with more sites on the network.
The layout will be the same for each site on the network so very little design work will be needed other than colour tweaks and a new logo for each site.
It fixes many problems creeping in to CP
Disadvantages of this network:
It's different than most sites so it may take some time to educate the users to how it works.
Have to coded up coderID API's
CoderID will be the central spot meaning it CANT fail (so need to keep it as simply as possible)
Have to code up a secure auto login system using locked sessions on the CoderID site so you can login to one site and then be auto logged in to other sites you visit on the same network.
I have one question about this update, how will the login be used? Will it be through sessions or cookies? And speaking on that note, if you are logged in to one site will you automattically be logged onto the others? If not this could cause a lot of un-need hassle among the users and may in the end drive people away from the network.
Personally I think it's a good idea, I mean this should keep everything fairly clean and running efficiently, and now just because (in theory, and even though this doesn't really happen) instead of the entire site being down due to an update, only one small section will be down.
This can be good or bad for CP, it just really needs to have a lot of thought put into it, and to how it's going to work. I have both faith and confidence in Scott, I highly doubt that he would intentionaly sabatoge one of his best florishing projects.
1. Since the main links on the panel are now to do with JUST codes... you can filter through codes in a very granular way i.e. first click PHP... then the panel changes to allow you to filter those codes by date / category / type.
2. EVERYTHING on the site is to do with source codes... no forum in site etc...
3. The only external links are at the bottom of your page indicated by the blue icon.
4. Notice how much cleaner and simpler the interface looks
5. It also means your account panel on each site will be much simpler... all you do is upload codes! No custom emoticons, security center, groups, comment center, account settings, applications to enable/disable... etc...
@Darkvengence
Obviously something as big as this does require a lot of planning in advance. The last thing i want to do is destroy CP!!!
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