What is Scoop?

What is Scoop?Scoop is a "collaborative media application". It falls somewhere between a content management system, a web bulletin board system, and a weblog. Scoop is designed to enable your website to become a community. It empowers your visitors to be the producers of the site, contributing news and discussion, and making sure that the signal remains high. A scoop site can be run almost entirely by the readers. The whole life-cycle of content is reader-driven. They submit news, they choose what to post, and they can discuss what they post. Readers can rate other readers comments, as well, providing a collaborative filtering tool to let the best contributions float to the top. Based on this rating, you can also reward consistently good contributors with greater power to review potentially untrusted content. The real power of Scoop is that it is almost totally collaborative. Of course, as an admin, you also may pick and choose which tools you want the community to have, and which will be available to admins only. Administrators have a very wide range of customization and security management tools available. All of the administration of Scoop is done through the normal web interface. Scoop will seamlessly provide more options to site administrators, right in the normal site, so the tools you need are always right where you need them.

Sketches Of A Help System Architecture

There are 2 components to this proposed Help System architecture: -> A structured help text -> The links to that help text at different points within the Scoop site.

HTML generation issue

Should the HTML be interpolated with its own helpids to allow cross-referencing?"Mr Cleanness and Mr Customer Expectation, they says yes, but Mr Cut'n'Paste he says that means I have to do some work of my own..."

Things That Need To Be Done

When the helpID is wheeched out of the database it needs to be wrapped in a nice little {A HREF=""}{/A} overcoat. For the moment we'll use an {A HREF="" TARGET=""} tag to open in a new window, but in future we might stick an option to either open it in the same window or in a target.