Proposal to set the OESF Portal as the main page

[Varti]

Hi,

as you already know, I always search for any news regarding the devices covered by our forum, i.e. the Zauruses, GPD devices, the Gemini and any new UMPC/clamshell being announced, and I post a new thread for every information I find interesting. I think it would be nice if these kind of posts would be treated as news items and shown in the front page as in any other news portal.

At one point, www.zaurususergroup.org used to be the news portal part of OESF, but that site is unfortunately long gone. OESF already has a simple, but still useful portal (https://www.oesf.org/forum/index.php?act=home) which is probably rarely visited, since it is not that handy to have to click everytime to its link in order to open it. In the current version of IPBoard the portal can't be that much personalized (for example, it seems that there's no way to disable the unused Calendar), but it has the advantage to put in the spotlight any important news. It also has a list of the latest posts, which I find to be nicer than the Today's active topics and View New Posts pages.

I'd create a new News and site announcements forum and add 3 new subforums there, one for each type of news; all the new threads posted there will appear on the portal as news items:
Hardware news
Software news
OESF announcements, which will be moved from Site Specific Forums.

For now I'd set the permission to post there only to the admins; I might check if there's any moderation option which would allow to anyone (upon approval) to post a news item, or just create a new News to be approved forum and move the threads from there.

Unfortunately, it is only possible to select entire forums as the source for news, so that all the threads posted there will be posted as news items; it is not possible to select single posts from any forum. So, if you have anything to announce (e.g. new Alarmz releases, or new software) you can still post in their relevant forums as usual, I (or any of you) would take care to make a separate, short summary news item out of it, with a link to the related thread.

Varti