Canada420 Activism Community

We’ve just updated the Canada420 software so that we get fewer spam signups and better functionality. We’ll be tweaking the design over the next few days and getting everything back to where it was, but hopefully everything will work much better now (and we’ll have fewer spambots, too!).

New features:

• Direct-reply to members using @membername
• Fixed double-posting bug
• New mega-strength anti-spam protection
• Consolidated posting streams — post directly to groups or forums via your wire!
• Threaded commenting!
• Ability to “Favorite” posts
• Shiny new theme!

Given the new anti-spam measures, the possibility exists that some things may be broken. If you run across any issues, please contact the admin team with how and where you ran across the bug! Thanks!

Update — 2010.02.20@20:26 (-7gmt): The backwards compatibility plugin was causing problems when trying to access member profiles. This has been fixed.

Edit: YouTube doesn’t like the .swf file I uploaded. I’ll add the video once I get it converted.

Quick summary of this tutorial:

• To create a blog, login to the site and go to the My Blogs dropdown, then Create Blog. If you already have one on the site (Feel free to create multiple!), it should be listed in the dropdown already.
  • Note: Please don’t use CITYNAME.canada420.org as your blog domain unless you represent your city’s local activist group. If your city doesn’t have one yet, by all means, please start one! That’s one of the main reasons this community is here!
• From the My Blogs dropdown, you can get to your blog’s dashboard by hovering over it and clicking “Dashboard”. You can also start a new post from here, as well as change your theme and moderate comments.
• From the dashboard, you can create new posts by select “New Post” from the “Posts” left sidebar element.
• By clicking the “Settings” left sidebar module, you can change your blog’s tagline and timezone. Changing the tagline is useful because it’s pretty lame by default and shows up in the header of most templates.
• Clicking “Appearance” in the left sidebar will open up the Themes Manager. Clicking on a theme will show a preview of what your site will look like, from which point you can either click the X to go back to the theme listing, or “Activate” to apply the theme to your site.
• Most themes have areas enabled for widgets. Some have a default set installed by default; if you add widgets using the Widgets page in Appearance, these will be replaced by whatever you put there.
• To add a widget to the sidebar, drag it from the widget listing to the desired sidebar in Appearance’s “Widgets” page. To remove one from a sidebar, just click the module and drag it to the main widget listing. Your site will update automatically.

Canada420 is now in public beta! Registrations are now open to the public for our Facebook-style social media tool for activists and activist organizers. We also have a blog for site development and coding for Canada420; see dev.canada420.org.

If you encounter any bugs or problems, please let us know!

We’ll be adding more functionality to the site over the next two weeks as time allows. Here’s what to expect:

• New themes
  • We’re adding a lot more themes for people to use for extra customization of individual sites as we test them with the site. Keep checking back to your Admin Dashboard’s “Appearance” tab to see what’s new!
  • As of Feb. 2, about three dozen more themes are active. We’ll add more as time goes on!
• New site design
  • We’re aware the main Canada420 page is a little blah. We’ll be spicing it up to make this Canada’s premiere online cannabis community portal!
  • As of Feb. 4, we have a new theme installed. Looks a little like… Huh. Something that Google did… I forget what it’s called… Looks snazzy, though!
• Better social networking capabilities
  • A major feature we’re working on is the ability to sign in to your Canada420 account via Twitter, Facebook or OpenID credentials. Content will be sharable via social networking sites, with admins able to auto-share group content to a specific Twitter account. This is some of the most complex functionality we’re working on and want to make sure it’s effective without being intrusive. Keep an eye open — these options will be under Plugins in your Admin Dashboard.
• Other stuff?
  • If there’s something else you’d like to see (Or if you like what you’re seeing so far) please tell us! This is a community built for and by legalization activists to better promote drug policy causes Canada-wide.

I’ll update this post as stuff happens. Check back soon!

Update — Feb. 04, 2010: New developments will be on our developer blog, located at dev.canada420.org. This will mostly be a service news feed from here on in.

Welcome to Canada420.org, Canada’s newest drug policy and cannabis community portal. Whether you’re new here or have been to the site in the past version, let me welcome you to the totally new and significantly more functional Canada420. Although it’s been awhile in coming, we’re finally where we need to be in making this Canada’s premiere online community for drug policy discussion and activism.

If you are an activist organizer (Or would like to be one!) and need a place to start building a local group of like-minded people concerned with drug policy reform, you’ve come to the right place! Simply create an account and start a blog (We recommend cityname.canada420.org), along with a group specific to your city or region. You and specific group members can post whatever you want on your community blog, as well as share interesting content with the rest of the Canada420 network. Or, take it a step further and share your community content with the broader Internet via Facebook or Twitter — Canada420 makes it easy.

Alternately, you might be trying to find a group near where you live. Our hope is that Canada420 will be an important resource for people looking to get involved as we move towards decriminalizing or legalizing cannabis. If a group doesn’t exist for your city, please keep checking back — there hopefully will be one soon!

From all of us here,

–The Canada420 Staff