Ozzu Focus & Category Reorganization

I think the only thing I would change is an update in the site's interface design.

I would give it a slightly fresher and modern look.

But that's just my opinion.

Landman

I don't know if it needs to change, but for me this is an example for a really successful and good forum!

I'd like to see a separate section just for wordpress.

You're trying to do too many things at once.

Do one thing and do it well.

My suggestion would be to do away with half of the crap on here, and upgrade the appearance of the site. It looks dull, miserable and dated. You need to make it more visually appealing and contemporary.

Do those things and you might be moving in the right direction.

Oh and another thing...

Place clear and obvious, log in, register, log out buttons up the top. Where are they??????

So frustrating, and probably costing you memberships.

Hi

As you no doubt have seen constantly the mobile web is the future for sales and marketing.
More people are using mobile devices than ever before and in some cases it surpasses the PC device.

What I would like to see is a section on the mobile web.

People need to know how to create mobile optimized websites, not just mobile friendly websits.
One needs to know how to detect mobile devices so you can transfer them to the mobile webpage suited for the device.

Many people think creating a mobile website is difficult and so do not attempt it. There are so many people who use mobiles and use them everywhere, even in the washroom. These are all potential customers. But if you do not have a mobile website, one is loosing the income of a giant potential market.

I believe if one can go for help to one location, they might be more willing to at least attempt to have a mobile friendly website which would benefit them in the long rum

I completely agree, and this is one area that i'm personally keen on sorting out. I don't like the competitions the way they are and i know there should be more in the way of coding and less to do with graphic design or photography.

Top cats based on language

PHP - CSS (ect....)

Parallel Sub-cats based on

standards comp - proprietary - impending releases

Thank you for all of the wonderful feedback so far, I will be going through and commenting on different ideas once more come in. One thing I have noticed is that ideas can vary widely, there probably is no right or wrong way but all of this gives me lots to think about so hopefully I can make the best of it.

Keep the ideas coming. Again I am mainly focusing on needing feedback for the structure of the website with regards to how the data is organized. I already am well aware that the usability of the site needs vast improvement (such as the login button), but I am not looking for feedback there. I am looking to see if we should keep a similar structure as we have now with forums and sub forums, or if we should expand or simplify that concept, or try something completely new such as tagging and giving the users the control via popularity for what sort of areas actually get the main focus on Ozzu. I am looking for these ideas because Ozzu is going to be rewritten from the ground up and before it is even started we need to make sure the best approach is used, and your ideas can help influence that.

Thanks!

Personally, I think it should remain pretty close to what it is. However, I've never done a complete rewrite on something of my own without doing something completely different - and since you mention complete rewrite and tags in the same post....

I wrote a system some time ago that would read tags on items (it was an ecommerce site), then arrange those semi-intelligently into a navigation tree. More popular tags became parents of less popular ones. It's a fairly simple thing to work up (at first). Applying that here, let's say you have 3 posts with tags like
1. programming, asp, captcha
2. programming, php, captcha
3. programming, php, mysql

you might end up with a structure like
programming
--captcha
----asp
----php
------mysql
--php
----captcha
----mysql
--asp
----captcha

There's a lot of replication if just left to itself, but you add tag associations, such as php is always a child of programming, for example. Once you have associations in place, take those tags directly from thread contents, cut out meaningless words like "a" and "the" and whatnot, as well as any words not in your dictionary for the selected language (if you have multiple languages), and let the system build your tree. Popular terms would always filter to the top of the tree, but (there's always a "but") your tree is going to get *very* big *very* fast, so you're probably going to want to do some ajax drop down to mimic something like Windows Explorer's directory tree. I say ajax because I'm sure you won't want to load all that at once. I said "at first" above simply because this grows into a monster very fast because at some point, you're going to want to include associations, tag placement pinning, heuristics and whatever else you can dream up to keep that tree straight. Another option you could give users, once you have placement pinning in place, is the ability for them to drag tags around on the tree to put stuff where they want. This won't negate the need for you to manage the tree through other means though, as it's going to have to have some sort of default that makes sense for people who haven't moved anything. If you do implement tagging, topics should filter down. Meaning on the home page everything shows, the next level down, only posts that have those tags show and so on down the line.

Still, I have to revert to my previous post and ask if a complete rewrite is really necessary. IMO it just needs a few tweaks. All that said, it'll be interesting to see what you come up with in the end.

One of the reasons for a major rewrite is it is tiring of having phpBB as the backend. With their release cycle it is a pain to keep things updated, with something developed from the ground up it will be much easier to just keep adding features, instead of always having to update phpBB with its painful ways to install customizations -- and Ozzu has alot of those! I would like to move to a more MVC model, currently its just a phpBB model or whatever you want to call it

As far as if the structure gets changed much, that is what I am still trying to figure out. If I do end up doing something with tagging, your approach is something that will definitely have to be considered. I think another important part to tagging would be letting users "subscribe" or make certain tags their "favorites" -- those would then stand out and would be liking having their areas of the board right there for them to visit. Imagine everything that interests you with regards to programming, or web design -- you simply select the tags that interest you and then any and all posts that are tagged as such would be on your radar screen. With the current approach and having forums and sub forums, I feel it takes more effort from the user to figure out the threads that might actually truly interest them. This is one reason I like the tagging feature, the other is that tagging allows topics to be in multiple areas as some topics should.

I sorta figured dumping phpbb was a big part of things, there's a ton of worthless code in it too, so running your own platform will naturally be faster. I don't think I was truly happy until I started coding to my own platform either.

In my view, back-end and front-end are church and state, you don't mix them ever. phpbb isn't too bad about it as open source software goes, have a look at zen cart once.

Glad you got what I was trying to say about tagging I think the ability to organise ones data in a way that make sense to ones self is always a winner. This also lends itself to creating feeds that users can view much like twitter.

Oh that was another thing I thought of. Why not allow the users to post the topic or question as a link on twitter? This would be great exposure for Ozzu and would add another channel that users can field their questions on? Not sure about a facebook app but I know that if I post a blog entry to twitter on completion I get a significant amount of views.

If you feeling really brave it might even be cool to look at writing it using RESTful services with Javascript MVC (Backbone.js comes to mind). Modernizes nicely, allows for focused module development and enhances the user experience quiet nicely.

In my travels I would highly recommend a TDD approach (I have started using PHPUnit and Jasmine). Cleans up code nicely, regression testing, quality increase and easier bug isolation. (Sorry I know that is slightly off topic - well way off - but I get excited)

Another idea might be to introduce a more social(?) aspect to the site. I know that stack over flow allows voting for answers to questions and the user can designate which answer was the best one for the problem. If you can get that type if feed back into your system then you can really start milking the data (users can also start milking the data better).

I have most definitely started leaning towards loosely coupled data structures and allowing users to manipulate the data views in a way that makes sense to them If you need more clarification let me know but I hope the out of the box ideas I am presenting might give you a different line of thinking in solving this problem.

Site is the most liked one, and Easy navigation to different section of the forum pointers will help people move freely around..
thanks for your all help..

Yes, this is exactly the sort of feedback and ideas I am looking for. Really appreciate what you guys have to say so I can really try and look at this from all angles before investing a great deal of time into rewriting everything.



Completely agree, and then tons of things we are missing too. It was a great place to start ten years ago, but now its like having a Smart Fortwo and then trying to put much more into it then it really was meant for.



Are you just saying have some sort of social media twitter button on each thread that easily allows people to post the link? I think that is what you are saying, right? At the top of each thread I did have that for awhile but not many were using it. It is possible they did not see it though, might make more sense to have those links by the reply box.

In the last week I have actually really dove into Facebook Apps and how it all works. Really starting to understand everything now and I have already created an app for another site I run to allow members to register or login via Facebook. It uses oAuth which many platforms use including Twitter so I will be able to easily allow visitors to login via multiple platforms and create an account on the site in an instance. The nice thing about the Facebook APPs is that permissions can be requested to do all sorts of things on behalf of the user. So for instance if I wanted the APP to post on facebook everytime they posted on Ozzu I could have the app do that with their permission. Many other things I could do as well including placing things on timelines, but makes for interesting ideas on how to get the site more social and easier to participate in.



I do really like getting the site more social too. These are all just ideas and thoughts going through my head but with Stack Overflow they basically allow you to ask questions and the best answers are at the top. With Ozzu I would still like to encourage regular discussions as well, so I was thinking it might make sense to have two buttons for starting a new topic such as:

"Post a Question"
"Start a Discussion"

Or something along those lines. If post a question is selected the format of the thread will be that the question is at the top, and then the answers that are given can be voted on with the best answers staying at the top, and the worst at the bottom.

If a post is for starting a new discussion, then that sort of thread might have its default view where it is sort of like it is now from the oldest to the newest. I think each post should always allow votes still, and probably any thread whether it is a question threat or a discussion thread can have it's posts sorted by votes, or date/time depending on what the user wants. The main difference is just the default view.

Lots to think about!