Looking for ideas regarding engaging community in my wordpress blog

[alexbowyer]

Hi
I run a small community site using WordPress, for a writers’ group.
I am using BuddyPress for the site, with Post Notifications plugin.

Basically the way we use the site is, people visit the site to make a post, and it’s emailed out to all members (which is useful for ensuring messages always go to the most up to date list). So it’s mainly just an email list, but with the advantage of a web archive, and the ability to share links etc – later on we will use it to publish our writing publicly on a special category of the same site.

What I am trying to do is get the users more engaged with the site; on average the group is not very technical – and mainly just think of it as an email list. A lot of them never use the site, and thus miss out on comment discussions on posts… and people have to do a new post if they want to be really sure people see something, since people are not on the site enough to be confident they’ve read comments, activity updates etc (actually i disabled activity updates as it was causing confusion between posts and status updates, but that’s another story).

I thought that a good way to get the group more engaged with the site would be to ensure that to read the messages they need to visit the site..

The post notification plugin has the following options – just send a link, send the whole text, send the text up to a more tag, or send the excerpt.

Ideally I’d like to send the first paragraph as a teaser, but then they would need to log in to the site to read the full message.

I am not sure I would be able to train people to insert a more tag or to fill in the excerpt field… so I am stuck right now with sending out the whole message by email. Which isn’t ideal as some people can avoid using the site entirely.

So I wanted to ask if anyone has any strategic ideas how to approach this problem…

Maybe there is a way to insert more tags automatically after N characters, or to set excerpt automatically, or maybe some other idea I haven’t thought of.

Anyone have suggestions or ideas?

[deepbevel]

Sometimes a voting system can encourage people to log in, at least if they care about what gets the most votes. One logged in they’d be more inclined to comment.

If you want to make it easy for users to create an excerpt you might try a front end post form, you can make the excerpt feild required.
Not all post forms have that option, you’ll have to look around.
I use Quick Post Widget which does have optional required excerpt, but it’s a widget, kinda small. Not sure if it can be shown bigger on a page.