Today we release a new version of our group home/profile pages. This is the first facelift for these pages since groups were first released, and it follows the style of our recent changes to the Tags pages. The new pages make it easy to see the stories published by a group, the people involved with the group, and the purpose around it in a single view. A group page should be a first-class portal into the site.
Groups are awesome!
If you’re not already familiar with our groups concept, groups are a way for multiple users to collaborate on stories, a blog, an ongoing topic, or ideas. Some use cases:
- Republishing stories of special interest, or on a particular topic. Examples:
We have some terrific birding and science community groups at Daily Kos.
- Creating a regular series on a particular topic written by multiple authors.
- Conveying news on a topic with a mix of original stories and republished stories.
- Regional Communities
- Collaborative editing on stories
- If a story is queued to a group before publishing, every member of the group with editor or administrator privileges can read and edit the story.
- Group editors can also publish it when it is ready, in addition to the author.
- Groups have their own shared private messages
- Groups can be used to make your own list of interesting stories, for example as a substitute for the old hotlist feature. You don’t have to invite any other editors if you don’t want to.
- Our staff groups use these same features.
Follow a group to get all the content they publish into your stream, which is a page linked in your pulldown menu from the upper right. You have to be a Trusted User to create a group, but anyone can be invited to become a group administrator, editor, or contributor.
Try one of the groups above, or look for a group on a topic that interests you. Groups with daily or weekly publish schedules tend to have a regular group of commenters and authors that end up creating their own sense of local community and friendships.
The new view of the Comics group
The blog view of Backyard Science is still the same and still available. There’s a line of useful links above the first story. Click the blue title link to go to the new groups page, or use the right hand icons to switch between blog view and list view.
What hasn’t changed?
Several things will (for now) remain exactly where you expect them to be.
- Your group queue location
- Your group blog view location
- Your group list view location
- How you publish an original story to your group
- How you reblog a story to your group
- How you start a new group
- Your group Kosmail url and how your Kosmail looks/works
I’m a Group Administrator, what do I need to know?
Group editing is now in line with your group instead of on several individual pages. It should be easier to see the list of members, change roles, and add new users. Invitations to join groups are now sent by email instead of by Kosmail/Private Messaging. And, you might want to upload a banner that suits your group better than the default block of blue. Your header can be as large as 1170 x 354 pixels. If you need to know more, we will have a Groups Tutorial accessible from helpdesk.
Now it’s easier to view and manage any group from a phone.
Summing up!
The new groups page is built to take advantage of story images as well as work better for tablets and especially phones, which previously could barely access group pages at all. It is built to be similar to the tags pages, which were released earlier this year. The page is “responsive” which means that the elements will move around based on the available width in the browser. For phones this means that the feature can be accessed without having to constantly pinch and zoom to read and access tiny type and buttons. For desktop, the layout can stretch to the larger available width and give you information in sidebars about the group. If you have a larger screen, experiment with different window sizes to get a view you like.
If you still like interacting with your group in blog view, that is still available. The Groups page showing a browsable list of groups also remains. This page is only replacing the profile and edit pages. This release, as well as the rotating group highlights on the new front page, is an opportunity to check out groups new to you and maybe find some great new community to enjoy.
