Integration of the forum into the website finally completed | Editorial Internal

The forum integration was on my to-do list for a long time and I had to postpone it again and again because other priorities were higher. In the meantime there were also some offers from the community, but in the end everyone had so much to do with themselves and the current situation that nothing could be solved on the side. So I just sat myself down this morning, gave myself a jolt along with my first coffee, and tackled the project in person.

What I intentionally left out is the visible user integration into the website. I just want to make the website look the same for all visitors, whether registered in the forum or not. And since there are no plans for either a paywall or a free ad buy, this makes perfect sense. A login field is simply unnecessary in this case and also steals space in the menu bar. So at least there, everything remains as it was. All new articles are already automatically delivered with the comment function below the page navigation, older ones keep the old known comment button for the time being.

And we have a new member in the newsroom: the digital butler. Because this will make the work of the editors and me much easier and create the new content as a thread automatically in the appropriate subforum. Therefore you should not be irritated if the butler appears from now on as topic starter in the articles, you can easily recognize him by the logo and the user title. Sure, I could have linked posting to a forum account now and identified the editor in question as the creator of the thread, but there are good reasons not to do that.

On the one hand, not every author is automatically a registered user, this is due to the nature of the website, which contains very diverse content from the community and from outsiders. And on the other hand, employees also leave or forum members insist on the deletion of the profile. I haven’t had this case personally, but if then “guest” suddenly appears as thread creator after years, that’s also a bit strange.

Then then rather Aufkommensneutral the article butler, which could perhaps also still a nicer avatar. So creative people are welcome to use their imagination for once.

Why I put it off for so long, I don’t really know today after a day’s work. All the previous attempts from 2018 and 2019 had always thoroughly spoiled my appetite, however the 9 hours invested also show that you can get there without a lot of personnel and therefore financial effort if you tackle it yourself and remember your own knowledge back. But I won’t mess around with it much anymore, because there are a lot of new things coming up. So I’d rather do another one of those heave-ho’s sometime.

Oh yes, and of course it is allowed to comment 😀