Liberal Democrats: Flock Together

Flock Together events pages now have a link showing you how to get to events anywhere in the country by public transport from your home postcode via the Transport Direct website.

Just look for the section called ‘Travel Details’.

You can have a go at working out your route to Harrogate via http://www.flocktogether.org.uk/showMeetingPage.php?Meeting=1108 or, indeed, almost any other meeting on the site.

I’ve added some more variables for Flock Together feeds…

The basic feed remains, as before:

http://www.flocktogether.org.uk/userrss.php?id=yourusername

Instead of your user name, it’s now possible to reference by membership number or postcode. For example:

?pc=RG14+1PJ&range=50

does the postcode and range (if you leave out range, it uses 50 miles). And:

&mn=1234567

does the Liberal Democrat membership number (although this only works for registered users of Flock Together who’ve entered their membership number when they registered).

For registered users who want to publish their feed, it may make sense only to show only meetings that they’ve ‘registered’ on Flock Together. To do this they can add the following onto their URL:

&registeredonly=yes

To sort the meetings in order of reverse appearance (i.e. the most ‘recent’ post will be the most immediate upcoming meeting), add:

&sortorder=meetingdate

If you want to show your feed on a Prater Raines site, then the best option is just to add the following to your URL:

&praterraines=yes

Finally, to set the publish date to the meeting date (which may break some feedreaders, since the publish date will be in the future), just add:

&scheduleddate=yes

I’ve had a bit of an RSS frenzy here at Flock Together.

There are now feeds for:

• By-elections
• Recently added or updated meetings
• Recent comments
• Blog entries

If you go to the relevant page there are also RSS feeds for organisations and comments on organisations meetings, as per the following examples for Liberal Drinks:

• Liberal Drinks meetings
• Comments on Liberal Drinks meetings

And there are also RSS feeds for individual organisations, such as this one for Federal Conference in the Spring

• Comments on Liberal Democrat Spring Conference

The organisation feeds and meeting feeds, as well as a personal RSS feed that only tells you about meetings that you are interested in, are displayed on the left hand menu on the relevant meeting or organisation page, or if you have logged in.

Some of the feeds take flags, as shown here for organisations and here for individuals.

Let me know if you would like any further options.

Do you run a Lib Dem organisation or local party?

If you’ve added any meetings for a particular organisation to Flock Together, you can now edit the details of that organisation.

Just go to the organisation page in question and hit the ‘edit this page’ link.

I finally did a few quick fixes to allow meetings to be deleted on Flock Together.

Historically, there were only two options: active and cancelled. But sometimes people make a mistake and enter a meeting twice, and in this case the meeting shouldn’t be shown as cancelled, but rather needs to be deleted.

The difference between ‘cancelled’ and ‘deleted’ is as follows:

Cancelled

Meeting details continue to be shown in the system and are sent out to people in the regular emails with a reminder that the meeting has been cancelled.

Deleted

Meeting details are not shown and are not sent out to people via email. It is still possible for the meeting creator or an administrator to edit the meeting.

Since ‘deleted’ is a flag on a meeting record, it is possible to undelete a meeting if you accidentally delete it.