Talk London

Flag/ Flag Anon

The ability for users to ‘up/down vote’ and ‘heart’ discussions/comments/ideas was a key piece of functionality for increasing participation. It allows the user to easily interact and engage with the site, when they might not want to add comments.

The flag module makes this easy to set up and apply across entity types, and gives a nice user experience out the box using the ajax links.

As a lot of the content on the site is user-created, moderation is also a key consideration. We needed to ensure Talk London administrators and editors were able to globally flag contributions for further review, as well as ensure members could report contributions at an individual level.

We used the range of flag types for this and were able to achieve the requirements. Flag module’s views integration made it simple to expose any reported/flagged items to moderators, and the event system enabled us to perform further actions when items were flagged and unflagged.

Flag anon helps to encourage sign up by showing logged out users the flags, and prompting registration when trying to use them.

Message

Message (including its stack: Message Notify, Message Subscribe & Message Digest) was used for:

• ensuring user actions are logged for analytics
• when user performs action (such as a user under 18 adding a comment) we create a message item to track this
• allowing us to add all the necessary fields to the message entity, and create templates for its display to admins/in emails
• messages also used for ‘new reply to your comment’ type emails to Talk London members (using Message Notify)
• message Digest allows members to choose how often they receive emails. Module uses the plugin system so we could add the intervals we needed

Ajax Comments

Provides a better user experience for participating in the community with very little configuration

Migrate suite of modules

• Large migration of existing content, comments, users, activity, files
• The suite of modules enabled us to write the migration without too much custom logic.
• Were also able to extend the core migration source plugins to migrate flaggings and messages

Paragraphs

• Providing Talk London’s editorial team with a lot of flexibility in how content is displayed. Including overriding individual displays on a per page basis, for example changing images in a related items section built from a view
• The paragraphs module meant we could write this functionality once, and reuse it in many components.
• Also gave a lot of control over page layouts generally, and allowed easy variation in how each component could be displayed