Escenic Community Engine
Social Networking is driving web usage and setting new rules for doing business online. The Escenic Community Engine enables you to unleash the power of your community or helps you build new ones. It lets users voice their opinions and share their own comments and stories on your platform, facilitating collaboration and user-generated content and enabling you to embrace the "Web 2.0" phenomenon.
The Escenic Community Engine provides the platform for building a tailor-made online community – from adding a simple discussion forum to your publication to creating a comprehensive, independent community site à la MySpace or Facebook, featuring all key functionality of an online community.
As the Escenic Community Engine uses the Escenic Content Engine for all content storage and presentation, users can publish both editorial and user-contributed content to the community. Escenic Community Engine can be installed on an independent server using all available features, or it can be integrated into your publication with selected modules.
Module architecture
Each of the Escenic Community Engine modules provide a specific community functionality. Modules can be used separately in different Escenic publications. Some of the modules are dependent on other modules and can only be used together - the profile module is needed for networking, and so on.
The modules use the Escenic API to communicate with Escenic Content Engine, making them compatible with future versions of the Escenic Content Engine.
Modules
The modules have their own JSP tag libraries, providing template developers with powerful and flexible tools for creating a feature-rich online community.
Profile creation
Enables user to create user profiles, group profiles, partner profiles (for sponsoring partners) and theme profiles. This module is the basis of many of the other functionality provided by other modules in the Escenic Community Engine. The profile module let users maintain personal information, upload pictures, write blogs about topics and subjects that interests them. The user profile can be customized to fit the requirements for a specific community.
A user profile may contain one or more theme profiles. A theme profile is related to a specific subject, for instance a pet, a car or a sport. The profiles can be customized and extended on demand in the Escenic templating system. A community for pets may contain information about race, weight and favourite food, while a boat community may contain information about brand, engine, sails and favourite seas.
Networking
This module let users to create, join and maintain networks with other users. Users can establish relationships with other users: Invite people to be your friend, find people with the same interests in the community, etc.
Users can set their preferences for whether they want to receive email notifications for new messages in their inboxes, new messages in a group or new friendship requests.
Content creation
This is a great tool enabling the users to create their own articles or blogs. The user is provided with an easy to use text editor for fast and effectively adding content to the community. The user can even upload his own pictures to his articles and categorize them with help of the tag tree (se the Tagging module). The community member can write and update articles with a variety of different content.
Though the user is presented with a simple, effective user interface, all content is stored in the Escenic Content Engine, providing the powerful content management features therein. Therewith the operator of the community has the possibility to repurpose the content submitted by the members of the community.
Multimedia upload
Enables users to upload their own images to their profile and together with the rating tool, create an interactive spin through creating “best rated” galleries etc. Images can automatically bed resized, cropped, etc to fit the design of the community. Multimedia files are stored in the Escenic Content Engine, and are available just as any other content there.
Forums
The community member can start and participate in discussions relating to different themes. Users may rate discussion (see the Rating module), making it possible to present lists of the most popular discussions, or even the most frequently rated ones, or the most heavily trafficked ones.
Comments
Allows users to comment on articles, pictures, blogs and other content. In addition to increase user interaction, this module is also important for interconnecting content in different areas of the community.
Moderation
Users that have administrator privileges can edit or delete any content on the site, using the easy-to-use front-end forms and tools.
User moderation is supported by the flagging or blacklisting feature. When a number of flags have been put on content by different users and exceeds a certain configurable threshold, the article state is set to draft and put in a blacklist section to be reviewed by a site moderator. The module can be configured to support the underlying business rules for removing offensive content, revoking user privileges, etc.
Tagging
Users can label content with tags, which can be both from a hierarchy of tags and custom-made by the user. Tags can be part of a hierarchical relation, making up trees of tags, which guides a user to find the right tag for their content. This can be implemented in the form of a tag wizard, with auto-completion of existing tag while the user types. The Escenic Community Engine offers support for both folksonomies and taxonomies.
Tagging is also incorporated in search actions. The keywords a user searches for are also interpreted as tags, retrieving all search results that are tagged with one of the keywords, as well as results that have keywords in their body text.
The Tagging module can of course also be used for presenting tag clouds.
Rating
Users can rate content using, and the presentation of the rating functionality is very flexible - it can be a number of stars, a dice, a bar, etc.
The module can also be used as a flagging mechanism used for banned abusive or offensive content. If an article, for example, has received three flags by other users, it can automatically be removed and the article status will be set to draft for review by a moderator. Other rating mechanisms include thumbs up/down.
Blog
Each user can create a blog, enabling them to publish text, images and other content.
The rating module can be used to rate the best blog on the site and put it on the front page.
Messaging
User can use the messaging functionality to sent each other messages, and also "chat" (with a very short delay). The messaging module supports exchange of messages of any kind: Text, images, etc. Each user has an inbox where all messages are available.
The Messaging module is also used for notifications, letting users know about action in the community that are relevant to them .Examples may be: When receiving a friend request, when someone joins a group you are a member of, etc.
Statistics
The statistics records actions carried out by a user, such as reading content, tagging, adding or updating articles, posting comments, rating, viewing etc. The statistical information gathered allows the creation and display of lists such as most read lists or most active members.
