Dannie Jackson
Posted in Theme Development 7 years ago
I have been looking at various social network CMS scripts and their themes and customization's, Fakebook is an interesting theme. However I have been looking for something more like the original MySpace idea where before Facebook came along and took away people from MySpace, MySpace allowed the users back then to customize their profiles with custom html and css they could paste into their profile settings.
I believe that in returning back to a social network format that allows customization of user profiles the users would become more engaged and do as the old MySpace users used to, which was learn some html code as they progressed along on the network. Facebook is mostly an un-engaging place with not much to offer its users other than posting things.
MySpace use to offer the user a page where they could paste in html code to their profile with links to remote photos and backgrounds and css files, of course the links to images could be stored on the user's photo uploads. Java scripts would have to be disabled in the html code so that no one could paste in a code that could wreak havoc with the profile. Some embedded applications could be installed but would be limited to strict html code only.
I offer this as a suggestion for developers to use to make a theme capable of what I suggest above, if anyone decides to under take this as a project let me know, I would definitely want to try out the theme.
If you think about it, such a social network would definitely be more interesting to the users, it could help make them creative and get people to developing profile html code for use across the networks who use this theme idea. It could attract people away from Facebook and back to MySpace like sites, now do not try to use the current idea of MySpace which is nothing like the original from back in the day.
Dannie Jackson
Replied 7 years ago
Zet Man I can see the issues you mention. With Oxwall as an example, this script has user defined custom html blocks that can be added to the profile page however they can not truly customize the whole page, by adding a block near the navigation bar they can add code to create their own profile cover or banner without a module or plugin, but they have to be told how to do that. However the block concept might be something the users can use to customize a page, now that leaves the issue you mentioned with the css, white on white, I think I might have done that once on MySpace but I was able to correct it since it only applied to the profile page.
I still think that the users would enjoy something like a MySpace experience, I do think allot of people learned some basic html that way and this lead to them doing some web page designs along the way later on. No one is into doing that anymore, Facebook folk have no idea of what html means.
Michael Zülsdorff
Replied 7 years ago
Oh yeah, I remember those days. :) They had that table based page structure, and you could do really weird things like putting an opening td into a field which was intentionally meant for just adding some personal data. And got ... IF you made it to insert the closing td in the RIGHT place ... an exciting and completely different looking profile. Or, if you didn't make it (as I remember all those cryings for help, too) ... an unaccessable html skeleton with no chance to revert back.
You said, you won't allow Javascript. I say: it's sufficient to choose white on white in your CSS to lock yourself out the easy way. Thus, it'll need a lot of error checking code to run a thing like that in a fool-proof way.
So ... is it really worth it? Do we really need these gimmicks and a personal wall paper to underline our individuality?
Due to the many requests in the past for additonal features and components we have decided to develope a premium version. Features like Hashtags, Videos, Polls, Events, Stories, Link Preview, etc included in it.
$199 (Life Time)
