Hey guys, here’s a demo URL. (Ignore the “splash” page with map that appears if you skip the registration window. We haven’t yet removed that file and don’t intend for it to be there.) http://www.patriotactionnetwork.co
(Just add “m” to the end of the URL to see the Ning site)
PLEASE IGNORE THE POLITICS AS I’M SURE WE MAY NOT ALL AGREE ON EVERYTHING!
As you can see, we created a pop-up for registration. One of the cool features of the pop-registration is the auto-group assign based on state chosen. This is important because we’re trying to integrate state based “sites” on the content side of the network with state based “groups” on the social side. To see an example of this check out: http://arizona.patriotactionnetwork.co/
One of the biggest shortfalls of Ning was the cluttered sort of static groups that you couldn’t do much about. With BP and Multisites we’re able to create a hybrid “state hub” that has both the full website feel on the front end, with a socially engaged group behind it on the social side.
Hey Boone, yeah we ran into a LOT of problems on pretty much most plugins as they aren’t built to handle the size of our community. Which has made it difficult in a lot of aspects as we’re sort of in uncharted territory on a lot of this.
We’re still configuring our servers before switching over the DNS so I’ll be able to post a URL for everyone to explore by Friday at the latest.
Paul, we used the Ning importer from wpmudev. It worked great for the first 60,000 or so users. After that it began to collapse a bit. When we got it back up and running it failed to include tens of thousands of the user avatars.
Also, for those interested, we integrated OpenX ad server to create a truly robust ad network that serves trackable mixes of Google Adsense, affiliates and internally sold ad inventory. Very cool to see it all working. You can catch a glimpse of it on one of the sub-domains at http://campaigntrailreport.com
