PostNuke

Flexible Content Management System

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New tools for postnuke community interaction

Contributed by on May 21, 2007 - 11:02 PM

All my modules have been developed for NetBiker.de, a postnuke powered motorcycle web community for german speaking bikers. Because of the need of programming some new functions I decided not to re-program one new powerful module.
I decided to program some compact, little modules that can be linked together and be used in any kind of community. So perhaps the modules can alo be interesting for your postnuke community.
As I wrote already - the idea of all modules is to increase the communication and interaction between the community members.



Graphical member search


Whenever community members want to get new contacts they can write personal Messages to other community members. So I first programmed pnMap, a graphical based user search engine. This is not a free module but all other modules are free and open source.



See how active a user ist (last login)


But very often there are many peoples members of a community but not everybody is very active. Perhaps someone has logged in the last time some months ago? If this is the case you do not really need to write an personal mail to these members - you better write mails to the more active members.
So I released pnLastLogin, that loggs the last login of a user. These information can be integrated in a member search as a sort criteria with pnMap or in the profile page of a community member. So you can see who is really actice.



Do you want to know who has visited your profile page?


Did you ever think about the question who visited your profile page? I think this might be an interesting gimmick for all community members. So I released pnClickedMe. This little program loggs who clicks whoose profile page. You can install a little block afterwards on your page that shows a user who has visited his profile page. So many people get interested and want to see who is that person that clicked me? Perhaps this can create new contacts!



Manage friends in a little addressbook


If you have created new contacts, you might be interested to store a list of "friends" with additional information to the contacts. For this you can use pnUserinfo. This is like a little addressbook.



Give your community the possibillity to publish content in weblogs!


If you want to publish some things about yourself, blogging is the keyword. Weblogs can be a really great tool in a web community. pnWebLog for example is a weblog module for postnuke. You also can integrate the newest postings of a weblog owner in his profile etc.



We need faces not nicknames!


Web communities are full of nicknames. But who is the person behind the nic? Mostly user's can upload an avatar but avatars are mostly used for funny pictures etc. But I think in a community that was build up to create real contacts you should be able to see who is the person behind a nicname.
To reach this goal I release pnUserPictures. Using this module you can define picture templates that can be integrated in a user's profile page for example and you can also allow it that users can manage their own gallery. There is not only a category managment possible, usernames can be assigned to the uploaded pictures. So it is not only possible to see the picture, you know who is on the picture. You now can integrate a link in the user's profile that shows with how many other pictures a user is associated. This increases interaction in the community. For all pictures there are thumbnail galleries available. You can install a block that shows the newest pictures and so on.



Give the users the possibillity to delete themselfs - if they want it


Sometimes a user wants to leave a community. Did you ever notice that there is no possibillity in the postnuke core yet for a member so that a member can delete its account with a click? If a user can delete his account himself, the administrator even has less work with such things. To make this possible, I released pnUserDeletion. But before you use this module test the deletion process on an offline backup installation. Some modules might have problems if a user is not found any more in the database.



Invite guests to get registered!


OK - loosing members is not really great but sometimes you can't avoid it. It's better so see the community growing. To invite people to get registered I programmed pnRegisterNow. This module displays a nice javascript popup (no nerving popup...) after a specified number of pageviews. So if a guest surfs in your forum and he opens the 20th page for example, he'll see a popup with an register link and a login form.



The advanced postnuke profile links most of the modules automatically


Now you have seen various modules that can be usefull in a community. But you now say that linking these modules is hard work? No, not really.
Take a look at pnProfile. This is an advanced profile module for postnuke. All modules listed above that are linkable are automatically linked after pnProfile is installed. You can define custom profile fields in pnProfile, integrate user pictures in the profile page, integrate the user's weblog and so on. Take a look at the information page of pnProfile and you will see that using these modules is very easy!

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