Hi,

Currently the group discussion is intended to be used within a group only while EasyDiscuss is more like an open forum.

We will see if we can further integrate this in the future but as for now we've already have an outline draft what we are going to do in 1.3 and will start focusing on 1.3.

Thank you for letting me know. I am excited about all that I know your team is planning. :-)

You are most welcome Sean

I'd also like the ability to use easydiscuss within easysocial groups

Thanks for the heads up on this guys. By the way, if you don't mind me asking how would you guys like to have the integrations between EasyDiscuss and EasySocial Groups? I am still trying to put the pieces of the puzzle together because if you were to have 1 category specifically for a group, then it would actually defeat the whole purpose of general categorization.

Hi Mark,

Thanks for asking for my input. I was thinking about the issues this might present yesterday. And, if I understand it correctly, I agree with your statement. Multiple categories within a group forum is ideal, but don't know about the structure of ED and not sure if or how it would conflict with other group forums or a main forum not related to groups. It would seem to me (without really knowing how it works) that each group forum could be associated as a main forum category and categories within the group forum would be sub-categories of that main group category. Those main categories (groups) and, therefore, child categories (forum categories), would not be accessible to a main site forum (if it were used). It would also seem that the creator of the group would have the ability to create categories within the group forum as forcing this creation as backend administration would cause the flow of the social site to deteriorate. The more I think of this the more complicated it sounds attempting to integrate the two. Perhaps building a forum into the core of easysocial and charging a premium add-on app for it so as to not undercut ED and having them be completely different products might be an easier thing to do. But again, not knowing the structure of it may make these points meaningless.

If I might add, this was the an area of jomsocial that received complaints year after year. They never did anything about it and I wound up disabling groups altogether because of it. There were attempts by 3rd parties to bridge kunena into groups but the ones that I tried failed miserably.

Luck

I guess if all the ability of EasyDiscuss added to EasySocial Group Discussion then why choose to use ED when you have ES? Like in ED you can create POLL in ES you cannot. But then ED was designed differently from ES Groups. for me having them both in a website will cause confusion for Users where to post.

Jackson

Thanks for that input Jackson,
I had actually thought that it would be nice to be able to share categories structures within EasySocial and EasyDiscuss. So, in my thinking I would be able to create the groups and subgroups once and both EasySocial an EasyDiscuss would use the same groups. I also thought it would be nice if EasyBlog could use the same groups.

I think the answer to why would people use EasyDiscuss if it was built into EasySocial is that EasyDiscuss could only be included in EasySocial if a person had purchased both softwares. But, I see that could be complicated to actually enforce.

I do believe that I will probably have some users confused about the difference between posting in a group discussion and posting in an EasyDiscuss discussion. I am not sure how to solve this except to try to emphasize they are really to be used for two different things. The Discussions in EasyDiscuss will be more of a Knowledge base and ticketing system. In EasySocial the discussions are more of a social nature. I guess time will tell how this works out as I am just now starting to get users into the site. :-)

Sean Carney

To me, having forums within groups simply increases the ability to organize discussions and shouldn't be any more confusing than not having that ability with respect to having a general forum as well.

Hey guys,

Thanks for the heads up on this. This is actually a pretty complicated process and I am still needing more feedbacks on how should EasyDiscuss work with EasySocial Groups. As a matter of fact, what about privacy concerns? Say, if you have a private group or invite only group. Things would be pretty complicated.

+1 to integrate EasyDiscuss with EasySocial this would improve overall usability. Heaving forum discussions and separate discussions within Groups is confusing.

Having said that I can imagine that integrate full ED functionality into EasySocial is not a trivial task, especially when you take into consideration that Stackideas team have to ensure Group discussions functionality within ES for those that dont use EasyDiscuss at all.

Why not to solve this by integrating a "reader of EasySocial groups discussions" into EasyDiscuss.
A reader would simply fetch discussions from EasySocial groups and display them within EasyDiscuss, the user would be taken into a ES group discussion when clicked on topic or discussion link.

The goal would be to display fetched discussions links within ED to follow order set by ED component, so it looks like part of the ED only the icon for example could identify that this is a Group discussion. The search function should also fetch ES groups discussions.
Page showing categories within ED could have additional section (a container) fetching groups names of groups that have some discussion created (or active).

Hello David,

Are the concern that you guys are facing is purely about displaying these "forum posts" within EasyDiscuss? I would like to know more what are the main reason that you guys would want EasyDiscuss to integrate with EasySocial. For instance, what benefits does it has to offer?

Mark,

Thank you for being willing to explore this. Currently when a user in ES chooses to start a blog on my site through ES they actually start the blog in EasyBlog. This seems well integrated.
When the users start a discussion it does not use EasyDiscuss. But I do understand that the discussions in ES may be fundamentally different then the discussions in ED. Maybe for my site I should call my ED something besides "Discuss" like maybe "Forum" or "Ask" in order to differentiate the two in people's minds?

On another similar point: I actually had thought how great it would be if my categories I set up for ES could also be used for EB and ED in my site. So maybe there could be an option in EB and ED to "Use ES Categories"?

Thanks for brainstorming with us on this!
Sean Carney

What I have in mind for EasyBlog 4.0 is to enhance the integrations with EasySocial in the sense where you could quickly blog from wherever you are without navigating anywhere. I am not sure if this is ideal for EasyDiscuss but let's try to collect more feedback on this as I am really keen to listen to what you guys have "in mind" about this

Hey Mark, guys...I think the total integration or agglomeration is the key to enhance EasySocial...To me it's the future...Has a Joomla! user for years I always face the same problem, try to make all the different components work together seamlessly for the front end user...Almost every site theses days need a Blog, Forum / Discussion and something to feature all the activity >> a community...

I think what we all trying to say is make the discussion tool in Group / Community has feature rich has EasyDiscuss and EasyBlog and make it so we don't have the feeling we are going somewhere else ( Another Component )...Give the user the feeling this is all been developed for one purpose in mind...The $$$ I spent each time to trick the users to believe that is insane...

So that said, your doing the right thing when you say that EasyBlog 4 will be so integrated to EasySocial that people wont have to navigate anywhere, that's it, you got it right there...Do the same for Discussions inside EasySocial and Voila! you have the perfect components / set of components...All we have to do on our side in brand and market it...

EasyBlog and EasyDiscuss can still live has a stand alone more if we could have all there features integrated seamlessly to EasySocial that would be nirvana...Why navigate to EasyBlog, crate and view new blog inside EasySocial...

Thanks for listening, waiting for your 2 cents on all this and a approximate date for EasyBlog 4 please...!!! :-)

Ben

Thanks for the heads up on this Ben

I put my vote in for a more functional forum for the Groups, too!

Thanks for the heads up on this Troy