Why Skemanon may be leaving Ning.

Our site is a design community. Most members make themes for Ning only, although I create for several sites. Pretty much, the profile page is what it's all about at http://skemanon.com. If my members can't style their page at any ning sites, they are sure to leave my site. The only reason I am with Ning and not fully on Wordpress and Buddypress is for customizing profile pages. I have in the past designed over half a dozen Ning sites yet not one of them is still online today. To me that does not show any promise for a future with Ning.

If you look through our forums, you will see that most of the content is tutorial based and added by me. Most of the member created groups are dedicated to sharing Ning themes... take that away from them and there is no longer any reason for them to visit the Ning portion of my site. As long as I have been with Ning all of our themes have been added to a Wordpress powered site, http://blog.skemaholicsanonymous.com/, because Ning doesn't have the content management capabilities that I need. So, since very few members blog or start their own forum topics, Ning 3.0 has not excited them.

When I started the site, most of us made layouts for Myspace. After Myspace made the same types of changes, those members stopped visiting. This was fine with me because we still had people becoming interested in designing Ning layouts. Now that Ning has decided to follow in Myspace's footsteps, only worse, I am pretty sure it will not be worth the effort to keep up with Ning and I should concentrate my efforts on my Wordpress site. After all, I am never "forced" to make updates there and it is way less expensive. ;)

Your input on this matter is much needed.

AnGella

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Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by AnGella on April 6, 2013 at 1:14pm

Yes, so it doesn't seem to allow individual page customization. Besides the copy cat "Cover" image.

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Permalink Reply by AnGella on April 8, 2013 at 9:47pm

I thought Ning was liked for that reason too. So many people wanted to go mobile though and I guess our stuff doesn't cross over well.

ϟḱεღøη ≧❀‿❀≦ said:

Sucks... one day they will change back if they actually do make the first change like there saying. I thought Ning was liked for that reason but whatever idk???

AnGella said:

Yes, so it doesn't seem to allow individual page customization. Besides the copy cat "Cover" image.

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Permalink Reply by AnGella on April 8, 2013 at 10:25pm

It may need a facelift, but I still have this old thing:
http://blog.skemaholicsanonymous.com/bb/

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Permalink Reply by AnGella on April 21, 2013 at 12:24pm

There is a Cover image that people can use. No CSS at all. All I could do was make this suggestion for allowing a background image and color palette.

Star-Dust said:

Is there anything you can do for Ning 3.0????

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Permalink Reply by AnGella on April 22, 2013 at 9:43am

CSS will not be back, our best compromise is the background image and color palette.

ϟḱεღøη ≧❀‿❀≦ said:

This cover image will be like a FaceBook Cover that is what Ning is wanting the uniform look. I am going to take the next yr to have as much fun as possible with creating. And pray that they change their mind somewhere in the middle of all this I hope it doesn't work for them and they give us our code back.... PRAY!!! Sounds like they want to be more uniformed across the boarder. Geez tks Ning we love you too.

AnGella said:

There is a Cover image that people can use. No CSS at all. All I could do was make this suggestion for allowing a background image and color palette.

Star-Dust said:

Is there anything you can do for Ning 3.0????

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Permalink Reply by AnGella on April 23, 2013 at 11:44am

At Jen's suggestion, I sent in a support ticket and requested an answer on the topic of profile styling.

Hello, my Members want to know if they will be able to add a background image and color palette as well to match their cover photo. This is a cornerstone to our community and I have many threats that members will leave with no options for customization. They want answers and so do I.
Thanks for your time.
AnGella

I'll keep everyone posted.

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Permalink Reply by AnGella on April 23, 2013 at 2:53pm

Oh boy, that I have never done! Can't wait to see your babies though!

ϟḱεღøη ≧❀‿❀≦ said:

I have a queen at 99.5 temp all signs in place and confirmation that today is the day (probably middle of night) when I can't get awake...I woke up at 8am yes me at 8am thinking I was hearing a tiny little meow I fell over myself jumping out of bed to find her looking everywhere finally it dawned on me Lexi is just laying there looking at me and I am running to every room looking for this meow.... doh She is so big she just has to lay down. Lay her on your chest and wow the activity going on in there.... Angela have you midwifed a queen?

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Permalink Reply by AnGella on April 23, 2013 at 9:44pm

Got Ning's reply.

Hi AnGella,

Thanks for reaching out to us! We do not have an option for members to customize their profile pages other than the cover and profile photos. We don't plan on building this out at this point. I've passed your feedback along to our product team for consideration for future improvements.

AnGella said:

At Jen's suggestion, I sent in a support ticket and requested an answer on the topic of profile styling.

Hello, my Members want to know if they will be able to add a background image and color palette as well to match their cover photo. This is a cornerstone to our community and I have many threats that members will leave with no options for customization. They want answers and so do I.
Thanks for your time.
AnGella

I'll keep everyone posted.

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Permalink Reply by AnGella on April 25, 2013 at 4:33pm

Thank you, I hope we will find a way to afford it.

Célia Cristina said:

Olá, Angela, bom dia!
Amiga, o que você decidir para o melhor do skemanon eu concordo.
Eu não tenho myspace, e adoro os temas que os criadores, aqui, nos oferecem.
Mas, Angela, eu sei que tudo tem um custo e você gasta seu dinheiro com este site.
Peço a Deus que você prossiga com o Skemanon para temas do Ning, se assim for melhor para você.
Muita luz e alegria em sua vida.

Bjs. Célia Cristina.

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Permalink Reply by Sparky Swan on April 26, 2013 at 12:12pm

Hate to add to the misery, but recently many photo's of all types (gif,jpg,png,gif video's) have been disappearing from sites, either on the Main Page, My Page, or blogs. I suspect api.ning.com is deleting those that are not proven to be "Public Domain", or have no watermarks or signatures on them. As they are stored in Ning's servers, they reserve the right to delete them at any time. This does NOT includes app's that use a third party source for their content, such as MixPod, Photobucket and Yahoo and Youtube video's. However, they too can remove content without warning. This most often has to do with license fee's and royalties's.
The best I can say about code migration is that Myspace, Ning, and most all sites use PHP and the Zend engine to create the basic code for the site. Assuming they allow HTML and CSS to be inserted somewhere, we can always adapt to a sites naming convention for it's object classes (header,banner,modules,etc). Even if the site code is written in Perl like Amazon.com, we still ony need an HTML and CSS port to customize a page.
When Ning 3.0 is the dominate code for their sites, we can still target the sites creator in terms of a custom look for the entire site.
We should not get "married" to any one particular Social Network. We need to target all of them.

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Permalink Reply by AnGella on April 26, 2013 at 11:43pm

lol @ "getting married" to a network. I am married to Skemanon, what platform it is on is less important to me than what it contains, my hard work and great members who also put a lot of work into it! :)

Sparky Swan said:

Hate to add to the misery, but recently many photo's of all types (gif,jpg,png,gif video's) have been disappearing from sites, either on the Main Page, My Page, or blogs. I suspect api.ning.com is deleting those that are not proven to be "Public Domain", or have no watermarks or signatures on them. As they are stored in Ning's servers, they reserve the right to delete them at any time. This does NOT includes app's that use a third party source for their content, such as MixPod, Photobucket and Yahoo and Youtube video's. However, they too can remove content without warning. This most often has to do with license fee's and royalties's.
The best I can say about code migration is that Myspace, Ning, and most all sites use PHP and the Zend engine to create the basic code for the site. Assuming they allow HTML and CSS to be inserted somewhere, we can always adapt to a sites naming convention for it's object classes (header,banner,modules,etc). Even if the site code is written in Perl like Amazon.com, we still ony need an HTML and CSS port to customize a page.
When Ning 3.0 is the dominate code for their sites, we can still target the sites creator in terms of a custom look for the entire site.
We should not get "married" to any one particular Social Network. We need to target all of them.