Team, as part of modernizing Roller in 5.1 I'd like us to move from two
Pings-related tabs to just one to account for their diminished usage
today. In particular, remove the blog-level Custom Ping Targets tab.
We would just have a single Pings tab for the user to enable/disable
ping targets defined by the blog administrator.
This change would have no impact on one-user blogs where the blog admin
is the blogger, as he can add whatever ping targets he wants still on
the admin-level Ping targets tab. Also, individual bloggers would still
have access to their own Pings tab to enable or disable whatever ping
targets are defined by the administrator. However, this change will
require individual bloggers who have another ping target they would like
to use (a rare situation today) to get their Admin to add it to the
Pings tab, with a default of either ON or OFF, for the individual
blogger to then activate (if OFF) on his own Pings tab for his blog. WDYT?
Regards,
Glen
On 01/18/2014 11:12 PM, Glen Mazza wrote:
Team, I'm late to the blogging software game so don't know the whole
story, but Apache Roller presently provides users two ping-related tabs:
1.) "Common Ping Targets" set up by the blog administrators.
Individual bloggers are welcome to disable or enable whichever ones
they want.
2.) "Custom Ping Targets", or those targets not set up by
administrators. Individual blog owners can identify their own ping
targets and activate them here, good just for the blog.
I don't think ping targets are nearly as important today as they were
several years ago, before Google became GOOGLE. Nowadays, you just
blog and set the correct META description elements, and in a few days
Google has your blog entry and returns it to web searchers. I never
hear people talking about ping targets today (and three out of the
four targets we presently support OOTB appear to be really minor
websites), they're primarily concerned about SEO and getting to the
first page of Google returns.
If I'm correct that ping targets are falling in importance, I wonder
if we should scale down and simplify Roller's functionality in this
area, namely move from two tabs to one with respect to ping targets.
One solution could be discontinuing the custom ping targets page, for
the few individual bloggers caring about a new ping target, he can
just ask the blog administrator for him to include for all bloggers.
There probably aren't many additional ping targets beyond the four
that Roller 5.1 already offers OOTB anyway, and arguably an
administrator should have to manually approve a ping target before it
can be enabled. WDYT?
Cheers,
Glen
