YJ News

Note to beta testers: The FAQ/How-To pages have not been updated since the design change, which is why the screen shots look different than the actual interface you’ll be using. The instructions for use should still be valid. If you have any questions, you can PM me (sadieko) using the Site Mail function on your Dashboard, or leave a comment on the LJ testing community.

Social networking has been an ultimate goal and issue with Yaoijournal since we first started putting it together. YJ is built on the WordpressMU platform, which is great for spawning hundreds of individual blogs, but not as good for connecting them together and allowing people to keep track of each other. Making it more like Blogger than Livejournal.

I originally found and installed a “Friends List” plugin that allowed people to 1) Search for blogs/users using the member’s name or email address, and 2) Add those users to a Friends List that would show the most recent post by that user to any blog.

What it didn’t do is show multiple posts by those users. You also couldn’t see all the posts to a community blog in which several different users post. This made it useless for watching communities such as Yaoi Daily.

Last night, I discovered that the creator of the original plugin has made an updated version that allows people to also subscribe to blogs, as well as Friend users.

I’ve since installed this new version and have discovered that while it’s still a little clunky and ugly (and peppered with Norwegian which I’m slowly editing out), it is an improvement over the previous set up.

Unfortunately, the subscription feature only works for blogs that are marked as Public (under Change Settings -> Privacy). Which means, again, that it won’t work for Yaoi Daily — but this will be a lot easier to change than with trying to use the previous plugin. If you have PHP knowledge and would be up help for helping me go over this issue, please, please let me know.

There will be a button added to the black admin bar on every blog to allow you to subscribe to it soon.

The plugin also came with more advanced Privacy functions, which include the ability to Friends Lock your entire blog. There is still no Friends Lock for individual posts, but you can limit your entire blog to be viewed only by people you’ve added as friends.

In addition to Social Networking aspects, it came with more user-level customization of blog themes. You can now add custom CSS to your blog, change the default font, and pick a different background images from the selection provided. In theory, these overrides should work on every theme, but I haven’t tested them all myself. If you notice any errors, please let me know.

Since this was designed by someone else, they don’t completely fit in with the YJ backend theme yet. So you’ll notice your sidebar vanishing suddenly between pages, but that’s being integrated in.

As always, let me know if you have any problems or questions.

For those of you who haven’t been on YJ for a while (especially during the lull between October and December) will notice some big changes in the backend section.

Most of the menu has been moved on to a side bar. The only exception are the more advanced options and blog customizations, that continue to open in sub-menus along the top bar. Please let me know if this is confusing to you.

The Dashboard is also simplified to remove some of the word-clutter you have to look at every time you sign in. Probably if you’re reading this, you’ll also notice that the most recent YJ news posts now appear directly in your Dashboard. This way you won’t have to going digging everywhere to find out when something new and different has happened.

And one of those new things is: tags! The tags haven’t been integrated with all of the themes yet, so while you can begin setting them up, they aren’t going to appear on your blogs right away. That’s coming up soon, along with Archives.

As always, thank you for your input and for sticking around with this project. Please comment with any issues and concerns you might have.