Now that you have a basic understanding of the site features that come with eCrowds, in this session we will cover eliciting feedback and input from your community via idea exchanges. An idea exchange is a social media feature that provides a way for your users to easily share ideas, and then rate, vote, and comment on them.
Now that we've explored how to expand on the idea feature included with eCrowds, let's cover how to build out your site's forum. Forums are a great way to elicit feedback from your organization's community, in addition to allowing user's to connect with and help each other with common questions or issues relating to your organization's products and/or services.
Now that we have explored how to expand on your site's discussions and forum, in this email we will cover how to add a new post to your blog. Blogs are a great way to facilitate community interaction by providing short commentary pieces that are comment enabled.
Now that we've explored the basics of eCrowds, the site features you get out of the box, and expanding upon your site, it's time to explore some of the more customizable elements of the system. Out-of-the-box, the eCrowds solution comes with 5 pre-defined content types: Blog Post, Wiki Page, Category Index, Standard Page, and Word Processor. Because these structured Content Types use forms as their foundation, they provide an easy means to structure content and to control the required fields for a given page, etc. You can create as many new Content Types as you'd like with eCrowds, but before you do so, you must create the form that Content Type will use to structure the page. In the next session, we'll walk you through creating a new Content Type - Press Release. First though, we'll create the form our Content Type will use.
As we covered in the previous phase of the "Getting Started with eCrowds" series, each page of your site is associated with a particular Content Type, which utilizes a form to dictate the fields, content, and placement of these items on that particular page. We'll now use the form we created in the previous step, to create our new Content Type, "Press Release."
Now that you've created some of the key functional pieces for your site, it's time to set up the structure/architecture of your site. Taxonomies are the feature of eCrowds that allow you to visually add new areas and sections to your site, or edit or add on to the ones you already have.
At this point, you've made quite a bit of progress with setting up your site with eCrowds. In this session, we'll cover adding dynamic menus (such as a "What's New" menu, breadcrumbs, "Announcements," etc.).
