As visible on https://biofabforum.org/ , the domain is now showing a mirror of the edgeryders.eu platform. Browsing around, logging in with an edgeryders.eu account all work so far. Was quick and easy to do, and seems to validate the implementation option I have chosen:
Hide the categories that should not be visible on biofabforum.org.
Adapt the menu, logo, favicon and rest of the design.
I will update on the progress in this topic here (and we can then discuss details).
Everyone will also be able to follow the progress along on biofabforum.org. (We’ll be working and testing on internal domains, but once a feature works it’s deployed right away on biofabforum.org and you can see it then.) However, please keep the biofabforum.org domain an open secret so far. I don’t think we need to add access protection there, but it will be officially launched by @WinniePoncelet later.
Category created. I created an (so far access protected) main category “Biofabrication”. This is the place where we will see all content of biofabforum.org here on the Edgeryders platform. I also made @winnieponcelet a moderator and enabled category creation for moderators, so Winnie, you can now go ahead, working here on edgeryders.eu, and create desired sub-categories (incl. logos and colors) and editorial content like wikis. There are no clear instructions for this, but you can have a look at how we did the logos, color scheme, content distribution to categories etc. on edgeryders.eu to gather some best practices and do it in a way that makes your platform fit in with the edgeryders.eu “host platform”.
Theme change mechanism. I found a working way to enforce a certain theme when viewing the platform from another domain. When you go to biofabforum.org and log in, you’ll see the page in a dark theme. Using a complete own theme for whitelabeled domains was not exactly the plan before, but since it turns out to be relatively easily possible, it is the best solution. It grants better isolation of the development work on the different platforms, and the Biofabforum people will simply be able to post their theme / design changes on a Github, from where they can be fetched by Discourse using the “remote theme” feature. The theme change mechanism I found so far is not too great though (does not work for logged-out users yet etc.), but I have a better idea already and will spend a day to make it happen.
Remote theme created. There is now a Github repository that contains the (so far empty) Discourse theme that will be used on biofabforum.org:
All look & feel customization will happen in this repository, and @winnieponcelet is welcome to share his and / or teammates’ Github accounts to get write access to this repo. This is completely optional of course, as Edgeryders does the theme development for the initial release. However, a Github account will still be handy as our preferred mode of collaboration on via the Github issue tracker, in this case here.
Remote theme added to biofabforum.org. As shown here, the Biofabforum theme is now integrated in our Discourse admin backend:
Also I adapted the (preliminary) theme change mechanism so that this new theme is used when visiting biofabforum.org (and logging in). This means that all changes we make to the theme’s Github repository will be visible immediately on biofabforum.org from now on. (Ok, nearly immediately. It needs clicking the “Check for Updates” button in the screenshot above.)
Theme development instructions. As a side effect of getting into Discourse themes, we have now a manualpage now about them.
Please tell us the design. We will need to know (now or very soon) how you want your platform to look. If you’re undecided yet, we’ll use dummy elements and you can decide later. In any case @winnieponcelet, once you have decided, please give us the following:
SVG or high-resolution PNG file of the logo you want to use
SVG or high-resolution PNG file of the favicon you want to use
list of your main menu items, with sub-items where applicable, and where they should point to (this is equivalent to the main menu found at the very top of the edgeryders.eu website)
color scheme to use (this can be easily changed later); in Discourse, this means defining the following colors (the list shows how they are currently defined for edgeryders.eu):
A reload, after waiting some seconds for the cookie to come in, could work to fix this.
But just forget about it for now. This was a test for a possible solution, but did not turn out well. There’s a better solution in the making now that will be ready in a few days …
Great news! We’re in the process of onboarding a new team member, who will take care of the graphics. Better use dummy elements for now while we get working on this. I’ll email you the ReaGent logo and favicon.
I don’t dislike the standard Discourse theme, so that can be the default.
Main menu items:
good question, I don’t really know if we need any. For now the default will be we leave it stand alone. A link to the Facebook group somewhere would be cool (can be the menu, or somewhere else if you think it’s more applicable): Redirecting...
I would however add a footer that says “Powered by: Edgeryders; Magma Nova; whatever other partner will join” and link to the respective websites.
Updates alongside with this post: Daniel finished the theme change mechanism. This is the proper solution, also showing the new theme while logged out now. I removed the previous, crappy solution. Really happy this new solution worked out well, as it was the last tech-wise unknown element in this project (I think).
Cool !
To be honest I can’t keep up with all the updates on Github, I rather wait with digging into it when the situation demands it. I trust you everything is documented very well!
If you do expect me to dig into it, let me know and I will
Since we don’t have your Github account, consider whatever happens on Github as “relevant for developers only”. We’ll ask you in this thread when I need infos / when there is something to decide.
Update: the frontpage of biofabforum.org is slowly coming together. The Edgeryders-only categories are hidden now, and logos of the Biofabforum-categories can be shown. (Note that this is a new feature, as logos of sub-categories are not visible on the edgeryders.eu frontpage.)
Still to do for the frontpage: showing category descriptions.
Good progress! I’ve added some categories and descriptions to get going. Navigation (eg. to the main page) is not so clear right now, as the Edgeryders categories still show.
I haven’t found how to make sub divisions yet. Eg. in the social area I’d like to make a subdivision for welcoming people, one for random stuff, one for meetups etc. Should we use “tags” for this?
I’m further dropping some stuff I noticed, without knowing if you’re already on it or if it’s planned for down the line. Let me know if I should keep these remarks for myself for now
The preview in a Facebook chat still shows Edgeryders content & logo.
I still get pings from Edgeryders when on the biofab forum (perhaps due to the nature of my own account? No problem if so)
The unread, new and latest tabs for me show mostly Edgeryders content
So far so good, the other community members are also excited about the forum and they like it!
Ah, you mean the main category dropdown on category pages. Right. I created an issue to have this element hidden in the future.
This happens when linking to the frontpage, yes. It will “fix itself” after a transition to a “better” implementation of the frontpage categories list, probably today.
You mean not e-mails but desktop notifications from the browser, yes? Ok, that’s something I have not thought of yet. I created an issue on Github for it …
Will also “fix itself” after a transition to a “better” implementation of the frontpage categories list, probably today.
Regarding the pings: I don’t have desktop notifications on, so I don’t know. I meant the blue bubbles in the top right on my account picture. Those are probably related.
Regarding the blue notification bubbles on the user icon: you might have an edgeryders.eu tab open in parallel, in which case it is normal that only the edgeryders.eu tab and not the biofabforum.org tab gets these notification. The same will happen with multiple edgeryders.eu tabs open in parallel, in which case only one of them gets the notification bubbles. Because Discourse keeps only one connection to one browser open to send these notification bubbles.
If you don’t get the blue notification bubbles even when biofabforum.org is the only Discourse tab you have open, please tell us again. In that case, we’ll have to fix that.
Updates: The Biofabfrum site is not yet ready for launch, but we are getting close. I assume 2-3 days at most, 1-2 days if it’s urgent (with some changes following later in this case).
(In the last days, quite some time was spent to fix seemingly random theme changes too the Biofabforum theme on the edgeryders.eu site. We feared that our chosen solution for the whitelabelling would not work out at all in the end, but actually it did. )
The important remaining tasks right now are:
Show only the Biofabforum sub-categories in the hamburger menu.
Make a click on the top-left logo trigger a page reload. (In effect, the user should land on https://biofabforum.org/c/biofab when clicking on the logo, but currently does not.)
And some less important ones:
Set the site title. (It is still “Edgeryders” currently, visible in the window title bar of the browser.)
Hide non-customizable settings in the admin backend.
Fix that e-mails currently use the wrong logo and wrong “From:” address in notifications about biofabforum.org activity.
the “From:” address to use when sending notification e-mails about topics in your category (not sure if we can get this to work in a meaningful way, if not we’ll use a more neutral sender name than currently …)
a short description of the website, ideally one sentence (will appear in automatic link previews when linking to the startpage from Facebook etc.)
)