Throng

We’ve finally opened the doors to Throng – for TV fans from New Zealand. There hasn’t been any other site where kiwis can go and find a community of TV fans to discuss what’s on TV until Throng.

Some features:

• Each member gets their own blog to post about their rants, raves and goss on TV shows.
• You can read members’ blogs, or each show’s blog (which pulls in all the posts from members’ blogs which are relevant), or just read news, spoilers, rants, raves separately on their own blogs.
• Members add the shows they love and hate and popularity charts show what the community thinks overall.
• Members add other members’ blogs they love to follow and members can become popular TV show critics.
• The site features the Personal+Community tag cloud (you’ll need to add your show preferences to see the colors) I blogged about earlier.
• The site also features a shop with DVDs from Amazon (handily in New Zealand dollars for once!).

We’re really proud of the site and have big ideas and plans for it after almost two years of dreaming about what we’d like the site to achieve.

Go check out Throng.

There’s lots of things we’ll still be working on and features to be added so feedback and suggestions over there most welcome.

Design and develop television community website Throng.  The site was originally built in Drupal but was migrated to WordPress.

We recently launched Throng – for TV fans which is proudly made using Drupal. Here’s some features and information about the modules we used:

Each user gets a blog and categorises their posts in two ways: once using the type of post (rant, rave, gossip, spoilers, news etc) and once with the name of the show(s) they’re writing about.

This way, people can follow their favourite blogs, or just read news/spoilers etc, or just read posts about a specific TV show (e.g. Grey’s Anatomy or The O.C.. There’s also a forum view, if people prefer looking at the content that way.

Because the list of shows is rather long (and growing as people post about other shows), a special page was created with the help of the tagadelic module.

The taxonomy image module has enabled each show has its own picture.

The love/hate module has meant that people can list the shows they love/hate. And when they go to the shows page and they’re logged in, the colors of the show change to pink/blue depending on their preferences.

Thanks to the Amazon Associate Tools and Currency Exchange API, we have our own Shop with pricing in local currency. The exchange rate is daily when cron is run.

The Bookmarksmodule has meant that members can add their favourite blogs to the sidebar of their blog. The module has been adapted so these bookmarks are public.

The Views module has been invaluable.

Other handy little modules include: Smileys, Word filter, URL filter, Private msg, Google Analytics and Forward. A few custom modules have also been written.