DaliCommunity

DaliCommunity is the new product in the LodgON family. Based on the Open Source DaliCMS Content Management System, DaliCommunity allows customers to create their social network or community of any kind.

 

DaliCommunity: Conceptual overview

The end user of a website is the center of the DaliCommunity platform. All building blocks are organized around the User Concept. Depending on the website’s scope, the focus can be put on:

• the user experience (provide a rich user experience)
• the user interactions (stimulate interactions between users)

 

Rich User Experience:

The main scope here is to provide the user with easy access to dynamic information. For this purpose, users have to be offered an integrated platform that supports their activities on the web on a certain topic. For example; a music community will have to contain a lot of information on music. This information comes from the community webmaster(s), but also from external music-sites, and even from users that want to upload their own music.

 

High ROI based on user interaction:

Users can add substantial value to the system by interacting with the information and with each other. By rating external RSS feeds or articles, by using flickr badges, GoogleMaps, by launching discussing topics, etc. users add value to the system. The total website becomes richer, more information can be found without forcing the user to go to a different site.
To optimize user interaction, grouping of users in interest ‘Clubs’ is supported. DaliCommunity also provides a flexible permission management, enabling various types of communities ranging from very open to extremely secured.
Users can produce content (called ‘Articles’); this content can also enter the system from external sources (e.g. by importing RSS streams). The ‘Feed’ that is attached to each Article indicates its source. Various attributes and relations can be stored together with each Article: ratings from users, logs on who did read the article, reactions, tags, etc.

Overview of entities in DaliCMS

User

The User entity in Dali contains a core of basic information (e.g. name, password, email, location, date of birth,...), and on top of this a rich set of possible relationships: a user can have

• A list of Friends (other Users)
• Membership of one or more Group
• Membership of one or more Club
• Created of one or more Feeds
• Created one or more Articles
• Several work experiences
• Outgoing invitations sent by this user to people that are not in the community yet
• Outgoing invitations sent by this user to community users for joining a club
• Incoming invitations for joining a club
• Incoming invitations for other members that have to pass through this member
• Advertisements placed by/for this user
• Votes on articles
• Messages received by other users
• Articles that are already been read by this user
• Feeds that are being watched by this user
• Photos maintained by this user

 

 

Feed

The Feed is the generic, high-level content container in Dali. A Feed contains Articles. A Feed has a type that indicates its content type. This can be plain content (CMS content), news, blog, forum, external rss, a bookmarkletfeed, clubnews, video.

Article

An Article is the placeholder for content in DaliCommunity. Articles belong to a Feed. They
contain some article-specific information (e.g. title, summary, content, tags, date of creation, language, rating, ...). They also contain relationship fields, e.g.:

• Links to users that read the article (note that this field automatically matches the corresponding inverse field on the user (which articles did I already read?). This is very common in DaliCommunity, most relationships have a corresponding inverse relationship that is automatically synchronized.
• The feed the article belongs to
• Parent-article (e.g. when an article was a reaction on another article).
• Child-articles (vice versa: articles can have a number of children. e.g. Reactions on an article)
• A user appreciation of the article (votes)

 

Club

The Club entity is important in communities, since it allows the creation of sub-groups with their own members, articles, external feeds, bookmarklets. A Club contains club-specific information (e.g. name, description, creator, private/public) and related fields, e.g.

• Members
• News feed
• Bookmark feed
• Discussion feed

 

 

Permission

The Dali API allows for the creation and modification of all entities. In a project, most actions on entities are subject to project-specific permission checks. Examples:

• Can every user create a club?
• Do you have to be registered in a club before you can create a new topic in the club discussion feed?