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Biblefox Development

Public Group active 10 months, 2 weeks ago

Developing the site and various WordPress plugins.

feature request: progress reports (3 posts)

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  • Avatar Image shawn said 1 year, 5 months ago:

    concept:
    A person’s profile page would list all the chapters of the Bible on a single page. Each chapter which the user has completed as a Bible study and either made a comment about or written a blog post about would be highlighted with a link to their comments or post about that scripture.

    reason:
    People may do many different reading plans throughout their time on the website. A person may forget that they have already read a specific book or chapter of the Bible.

    This would give a visual representation of how much of the Bible a person has actually read.

    By highlighting the chapters a person has written or commented about, would give extra weight to the fact that they have actually read the chapter in question.

    It would also give the user a very quick way to search through what they have read and be able to quickly link to their own comments/posts about the passage in question.

    extending the concept:
    It would be neat to show a simple bar graph next to each book of the Bible that shows how much of the book has been read and how much has been commented on.

    This would make it easy to give ‘awards’ to people as they complete their reading assignments. Who knows it may encourage people to read more than they do now.

    To make sure that people are not just posting ‘generic filler’ content in order to gain points or awards, I could see tying this into a user rating system where other users rate the comments via thumbs up/down or stars as to the quality of the comments/posts of the user.

    Basically I am just trying to come up with other ideas to get our men’s Bible study group members to start reading the Bible more often. It amazes me that they will spend hours playing stupid facebook games just to win badges, yet spend so little time in the word.

    Even more so, I could see how this would be a fun ‘game’ for the children’s church to play.

    b.t.w.
    I’ve started a fundraiser in our mens Bible study group to try to raise money as a donation for the extra Bible search/reading plans plugins. I had tried emailing a few times but didn’t hear back from you about how everything was coming along. I figured that maybe if we raised enough donations that it might spur the project on?

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  • Avatar Image Richard Venable said 1 year, 5 months ago:

    So, let me try to divide this idea up into some useful template tag functions:

    One function (we’ll call it refs_read_by_user()) could return all the Bible references that a user has commented on or has read as part of a reading plan.

    Another function could take a list of Bible references and a book and return what percentage of the book was intersected (we’ll call it percentage_of_book()).

    So then you could just add something like this to your theme:

    $refs_read = refs_read_by_user($user_id);
    foreach ($books as $book) {
    $percentage = percentage_of_book($book, $refs_read);
    echo “$book: $percentage%”; // Echo the percentage or output some crazy cool graph thing
    }

    Does that sound like a solution to what you are requesting?

    Wow, donations! You are a serious Biblefox user! I would definitely appreciate any donations, but I’m already placing a high priority on your suggestions. As I mentioned to you in a PM this morning, I was out of town for the last two weeks, so that is the main reason for delay. I will let you know though, that I have 2 jobs right now: Biblefox and developing iPhone applications as a contractor. Biblefox is my own creation, and is what I am most passionate about, but I haven’t made a dime off of it. The iPhone stuff is where I get paid. I enjoy it as well and it is an incredible blessing to have, but it does take me away from Biblefox.

    I do have ideas for making money off of Biblefox, but they are pretty far down the road because I have high standards for wanting Biblefox to be completely open source, and free for most users, and not clutter things with advertisements (obviously I’m very inspired by WordPress’s business model). Maybe some day I will look for investors or something and make you a business pitch!

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  • Avatar Image shawn said 1 year, 5 months ago:

    I would add an argument to the refs_read_by_user() which pulls in the references that the user actually commented on. This would allow for 2 separate lists.
    1. those scriptures the user has read
    2. those scriptures the user has commented on or blogged about

    You absolutely nailed the percentage_of_book() function.
    I can see how it would be cool to tie in the users % of each book into the new achievements plugin, so the user gains ‘awards’ as their percentage increases. It also makes it easy to display users with highest %, highest % of ‘quality’ posts or comments about each book etc.

    Yup, I really do want to become a serious Biblefox user. After I did the demo for our men’s Bible study group and saw how much they liked the idea, it only seemed appropriate to start raising money for its development. I told the guys it was going to take you a few weeks to package everything up for us to use, and that you are not making money doing this. We just wanted a way to say thank you and to help spur on the development of the new downloads.

    Where it became really apparent to us on how well it would work was last Thursday when dad was not able to make it to the Bible study due to having heart issues again. (dads health is really bad lately). As we are continuing in our study, I decided to talk with dad and took notes about what he was going to ‘preach’ on for the Bible study that week. I then shared with the group what dad’s thoughts were on the scriptures.

    It would have been really cool to have Biblefox studies up and running on our site, so that dad could have simply typed in his notes for that weeks scriptures. We would have used the computer during the Bible study so the guys could see what dad said. We could comment on his comments, and then while he was in bed, he could have responded to us live.

    I know that is an ‘edge’ case on how to use Biblefox, but it would have been cool to have anyhow.

    Now you just need to put a paypal donation link somewhere on your site, so that I can send the money we raised. It’s not a lot as our group is very small, but it’s from the heart, and is everything the guys could afford to do.

    As to making money with Biblefox:
    I really don’t have any ideas there. I’m sure you are way ahead of me on that one, as maing money off it, is not something that had even really crossed my mind. I just like providing the best tools that I can find for my church, and friends like you do.

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