Hello. After 2 days of intense fiddling, I have finally created a register page for new user, log in page for existing users and an interface which looks Facebook-ish.
This is what my front page is like :
That's what it looks like for people who have not registered or logged in. For users, the menu bar displays some different menu options and icons as you'll see later below. It was a bit of hassle to figure out how to do that, but it seemed necessary as to not show information or posts if the person wasn't signed up to the website yet.
On the topic of the name..yeah I know, cheese. It's supposed to be a combination of 'ensemble' and 'assembly' because like you get to assembly your own ensemble? IDK but gonna stick with it.
This is the register page:
That image, by the way, I got for unsplash. The original buddypress register page is not very aesthetic, so I had to follow some online tutorials, and use plug-ins to design that page. Most of my considerations when making it was uniformity, and consistency of aesthetic when travelling from page to page, hence the same picture.
The log in page:
Similar aesthetic but made using a different plug-in, which had built in templates from which you could customise. Now that I'm looking at them back to back though, I should probably put some hyperlinks in the register page to allow users to go back to the front page.
Here's a quick video of the home page once you're logged in:
That should show all members' most recent posts and activities. There's options to filter through those as well to just display your friends' or your groups' activities.
I'll show you what a user's profile looks like at the moment as well. Please excuse the random posts and me talking to myself - I was just testing stuff:
So, the functionalities are quite similar to most social media websites you, most similar to Facebook probably, with notifications, friends, groups, and media upload. You can customise your own profile as well with avatars and cover photos. In fact, a lot of functionality is built in into buddypress - the tricky part is knowing what stuff to keep and what to omit, especially if your idea of a social network is based around one particular function (media sharing) rather than simply for socialising.
The video upload was also made possible only through a plug-in. Typically Wordpress and buddypress enable video linking, like embedding a YouTube video onto your page. That plug-in can then be used with another plug-in to create thumbnails of your videos. However, it doesn't work if you are hosting locally for some reason. So the dilemma I am facing at the moment is whether to continue using that plug-in for the presentation in a fortnight's time, or to manually edit videos, upload to YouTube, and embed to better represent the aesthetic I have in my head. Maybe a combination of both would be possible...
The next steps will be to find a way to categorise activities. Wordpress already has a tagging system but currently that only seems to apply to posts (which I'm not using) rather than activities. I will need to find a way either to connect the tagging system to activities or to change all activities into posts.
I think hashtags would be a neat and easy way to extend the built-in tagging system, and I have already seen some highly rated hashtagging plug-ins.
Also the search bar doesn't seem to work for tags at the moment. Ideally it should be able to search for multiple tags and concatenate the searches i.e. search for #saxophone #paul #desmond and the search results would prioritise results with all hashtags.
Anyway, I don't think I will be able to make it as polished as I want it to be. In the end, I think a supplementary resource like a PowerPoint presentation may be needed to flesh out the project.