Roni has asked me about updating the League of Worlds site before LoW5 in October. There are three separate elements involved in this.
Firstly, there is the simple question of updating. The site currently runs an old version of WordPress on a GoDaddy account. Since it gets relatively little traffic, it could usefully be updated and moved to my HostMonster account, where it will cost considerably less to run.
Secondly, there is the question of functionality. What is the site for? Is it just a notice-board for the annual conferences, or can it have some sort of ongoing function?
My feeling is that it could act as a library of cross-posts. Members write whatever they write and then it gets crossposted it to the League of Worlds site. To this end, I have found two WordPress plug-ins that will subscribe to RSS feeds, and then turn them into native posts. They are WordPress-o-Matic and FeedWordPress. I will explore them in more detail next week.
If I can get one of them working in the way I want then all anyone will have to do is to inform me that they have set up a League of Worlds category on their site, with its own RSS feed, and the League of Worlds site can subscribe to it, and republish everything written there.
The advantage of this is that we can attract new readers who are interested in the communal thinking but not necessarily interested in exploring everyone’s individual sites. We might also begin to get group comments.
Thirdly, there is an issue of automatic membership rights. This is trickier.
Roni would like people to be able to register for the conference online, and then (when registered) submit their abstracts and papers themselves. This sounds reasonable to me. I just need to think how to implement it, so that it requires as little manual intervention as possible.
A day or so later…
I have just found the Role Scoper plug-in, which may do just what we need. It lets you set the roles to allow “someone to contribute their own pages without editing other’s post or page”. What’s more it is specifically designed for multi-user sites.