Thread

Today, I was introduced to P2 for WordPress (Example: P2 demo) and I have to admit that it is a clever template allowing some sort of intuitive group microblogging. Of course, WP installations are lacking a lot of flexibility compared to EE, but some features are really nice and it would be great to have something similar for EE. I’m positive it should not be too hard to rebuild a similar function in EE and use it only in one part of an EE site (using P2 on a Wordpress installation renders your whole site as a microblog).

Any ideas how you would start rebuilding P2 in EE? Or has someone already implemented similar features in EE?

Markus

[Mod Edit: Moved to the General forum]

Which features are you particularly interested in replicating?  I watched the intro video on the demo page and they’re highlighting a lot of the client-side stuff.  That much is platform independent.  You can use their jQuery or develop your own, but none of it is too difficult to replicate.

As for posting: SAEF.  Threaded comments: Weever (from Mr. Wilson - you’ll have to contact him directly as his site is currently down, I believe).

Arun, thanks for the suggestions - totally agree with you.

Actually, there is not one particular feature I’d like to replicate, but the “look & feel” P2 offers. The idea to rebuild P2 in EE wasn’t raised by a particular project, but by a collegue introducing me to P2 and mentioning “You can’t do that with your beloved EE ... can’t you?” - I’m sure I could, but inline editing, tagging and the AJAX features might need some clever planning - so every suggestion is very welcome!

Markus

I’m not sure about the tagging stuff but vosSavant posted a tutorial for inline editing in this thread. It uses the Prototype library and does have some limitations, but it might be a good starting point.

I hope you keep us posted on the progress of this because it sounds pretty interesting. Good luck!

The idea to rebuild P2 in EE wasn’t raised by a particular project, but by a collegue introducing me to P2 and mentioning “You can’t do that with your beloved EE ... can’t you?”

lol…annoying!  So, are you actually going to build this in EE?  If so and if you need any help - shoot me a PM.  I think it would be fun to port this over to EE.

Update: I spend part of the weekend rebuilding the P2 feature set in EE. While still missing the nice AJAXified handling at the moment, it was much easier to implement more or less the whole P2 core features in EE.  Only free and donationware add-ons are used currently, building on a default installation of EE.

Primary design decisions: Topics started are implemented as simple entries in a weblog/channel (with title, body and tags to be filled by the user), replies are comments to that entry, categories are not used and tagging for the entries is done with Silenz’ Simple Tags (see below).

There is no demo available right now, but here’s an overview of the concepts and add-ons used so far:

for starting new threads: an extremly simple SAEF form with some hidden fields setting default values
for inline editing of entries: SAEF plus Solspace’ Form Helper
for inline commenting: an EE native comment form tag with hardcoded entry_id
for inline comment editing: Paul Burdicks Edit Comments plugin
for tagging: Silenz’ Simple Tags
for Gravatar support: Les Jenkins EE Gravatar

I would perhaps drop the Gravatar part and switch to EE’s built-in avatar support, mostly due the the fact the I wasn’t able to get the plain email address for the currently logged-in user - the tag gives the JS encoded mail address instead.

Moreover, in contrast to the Wordpress P2 solution, EE needs the title and url_title field entered. That makes the solution somewhat less elegant, but at the same time allows more structure and enhances the overview. There are a lot more of features one could implement as well - perhaps limiting the possible input would be nice, as well as more administrative control in the frontend.

Now, the look and feel would need to be polished. I’m not a JQuery/AJAX wizard and its just a fun project for me - so if anyone is interested in helping with getting a slick demo up and running, just drop me a PM.

I’l update this thread if there is new progress.

Markus

Hey ms,

I have always been a fan of inline editing, and recently wrote an updated tutorial on how to achieve this with modal boxes. This method overcomes some of the limitations in my last tutorial, and might be more along the lines of what you are after.

Tutorial here