user tip Working on "look & feel" & eager for suggestions.

Waves hello to fellow (former) Ningsters!

After months of lurking, I'm delighted to finally be moving my Ning 2.0 site over to Jamroom. I've got my initial JR site up and installed the modules necessary for an Ning Conversion. I've also installed & then cloned the Ningja skin and will now start customizing it.

I'm curious; do Ningsters ever start out with other skins? Since I basically want to use all of the functionality provided by Ningja is it even worth considering?

I want to change the Ningja page layout. Do I proceed directly to Site Builder and start creating new pages including the Home page (as the current one seems to get blown away when I fire up Site Builder)?

Are there any modules the you wouldn't recommend for the Home page because of performance issues? Has anyone adder an Image Slider (a la Elastic)?

ETA: I'm also curious about incremental loading. I have seven years worth of information that needs to be cleaned up before I port it all over. I wouldn't mind bringing in the last six months or so just to give me some test data to see how the site fills out. Is this feasible?

Any other tips, tricks and/or words of wisdom are most appreciate.

Thanks!
Tat
updated by @tatiana-dokuchic: 01/07/17 03:44:01PM

Hi Tat - Welcome to Jamroom (even though it seems you've been here some time )
Hopefully some of the other ex-Ningsters here will jump in here and offer advice etc. but I can answer a couple of your questions -

I'd say that all our modules are ok to load as we are very conscious of performace issues and always create code with that first and foremost. The only module I'd suggest that you would need to be careful of how you use it is the Seamless module. This merges specified lists of JR items into one big list so by necessity does individual database calls to get all initial lists, then sorts, shuffles and orders them which can be a big hit on server resources. I'd recommend using this module to merge no more than 2 or 3 sets of items, and keeping its searches as simple as possible. Also use it no more than once per page.

There are options in the NingImport module for this. You can set the import for 'no older than' in months. Note that this does not apply to imported members, but you can selectively import active. pending, suspended and left members.
Hope this helps
Paul


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Paul Asher - JR Developer and System Import Specialist

Thanks, Paul! Nice to meet you

Good to know about Seamless. I'll keep that in mind.

Just to reconfirm - I can import 3 months of data now and then add both older and newer data on top of that when I'm ready for the permanent move? That's excellent!

Yep, that's right You can re-import at any time with the latest Ning archive, or with different import parameters, and only new items that don't already exist on Jamroom will get created.


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Paul Asher - JR Developer and System Import Specialist

Sounds grand, Paul. Thanks!

Let me know if you want a hand at import time - setting up the options can be a bit daunting. Alternatively, purchase our import service and I'll do the initial 3 months worth of import, then top it up for you when you are ready to go live.


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Paul Asher - JR Developer and System Import Specialist

Sounds good, Paul.

Hi Tat. Cloning the NingJa skin before making changes... ah! I should have thought of that! Smart!

And Paul, I should have asked about bringing over the new content that's been added to the Ning site while I've been setting up here. There's not much and I'm asking users to re-post it themselves as a way of acquainting themselves with the new site... but I'll keep this in mind as an option. Thanks.

Tat, I had issues with the Tag Cloud in my home page layout. It needs a wide space to display properly and I was trying to put it in a column.

I've used Site Builder to override NingJa pages and adjust the main menu. It takes some adjusting to. Read the documentation and other posts in the Support Forum. Your original NingJa pages will not be lost, just hidden by the Site Builder pages, which you can delete at any time to reveal the original page. With my home page, I created a new URL first to work on it and to be able to look back and forth between the NingJa home page and the one I was creating. I only changed it to the Home position when I was pleased enough with what I'd created.

Its not too late to do that. When you clone skins any template changes you have already made are carried through to the clone skin. You can then revert the original skin to default.
Actually, this is a good way to back up locally your skin development. Every day clone the working skin to jrNingja20160920 or whatever the date is then if your development goes drastically wrong one day you can quickly revert to where you left off yesterday.
Be sure to delete any cloned skins more than a few days old so as not to fill your server with un-needed skins though.

NOTE - This will not work with SiteBuilder, which has its own import/export tools. Do this if you are developing by modding templates.


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Paul Asher - JR Developer and System Import Specialist
updated by @paul: 09/20/16 12:21:51PM

Good to know, Lesrinchen (Les?).

Thanks for the tip, Paul. I'm sure to mess up big-time at least once a day so your strategy will really save some heartache

Hi Tatiana, I remember you from Ning...and your beautiful site too! You will love Jamroom.


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...just another satisfied Jamroom customer.
Migrated from Ning to Jamroom June 2015

Hi Strumelia! Thanks for the kind words, I'm quite enamoured of Jamroom already. I always appreciated your comments about Jamroom over at the Creators Forum as they provided me with a lot of encouragement to make the move.

I've been checking out your new site. It looks great! Did you do all the customization yourself?

Tatiana, I worked on my site alone for several months, but I'm not a coder. I got a bit of help with some final tuning from a couple of the JR Team in prep for when I went live. (this was all while the Site Builder was still in Beta). Paul helped me with the import process. What heroes they are!
Since going live over a year ago, I've learned a little more here and there and mostly make site tweaks myself now, though there's not much i need to change on my site since then- my members love it. They realllly wanted me to make the new site feel familiar to the old Ning site, so I had to take that into account while laying things out- it's not a 'slick' site by any means. But it does everything we want it to and WAY more. I did recently add those two ad sliders on my Main page.
You know Soaring Eagle (formerly Mr.I-Love-Ning himself) is on Jamroom now as well...everyone's favorite character with his gigantic dreadlock site. (Soaring you know i love you) ;D


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...just another satisfied Jamroom customer.
Migrated from Ning to Jamroom June 2015

I'm pretty sure you can customize the Ningja skin into almost anything you want. Just my opinion but it's got the right setup to handle/receive all your ning pre-existent content. Maybe just see how far you can tweak it without coming upon limitations in what you envision?


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...just another satisfied Jamroom customer.
Migrated from Ning to Jamroom June 2015

Can someone share easy directions for cloning a skin? I'd like to play around with a skin but don't want to "mess it up" (says the queen of non-coders).

Go to ACP->Developer->Tools->clone skin. be sure to leave at least one prior skin version intact just in case you want to revert back if you mess up too much. Only one skin can be the 'active' skin- use the little checkbox to choose which one. Do NOT ever delete your currently 'active' skin!


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...just another satisfied Jamroom customer.
Migrated from Ning to Jamroom June 2015

Hi Deb - you can find it at Modules = Developer = Developer Tools = Tools = Clone Skin

Strumelia, I'm not looking for anything too far from what I currently have either as I agree the familiarity is a big plus with members. And yes, I did see that Soaring Eagle is here as well

Thank you...

Yay, thank you for information about cloning skin.
We are quite new on jamroom and I'm a non-coder. On ning we had a test site to check all changes. Here I was wondering how to check future changes.

Every day I meet amazing people here.
I hope in the near future I'll be able to help others.

@joanna, this is probably the doc you're after:

Docs: "Using the Compare tool to keep Cloned skins up-to-date"
https://www.jamroom.net/the-jamroom-network/documentation/skin-customization/2394/using-the-compare-tool-to-keep-cloned-skins-up-to-date

There are a few different ways you can customize jamroom, one is using the template editor and adjusting things in the ACP

Docs: "Using the Template Editor"
https://www.jamroom.net/the-jamroom-network/documentation/jamroom-admin-handbook/3183/using-the-template-editor

If you use the template editor all your changes will be stored in the database. Doing it this way means you don't need any web development software on your PC to make changes and so will probably be the first way you make alterations to the look and feel of your site.

For me, I like the 'web development software on the pc' way of doing things, so I make changes with that and upload those changes to the filesystem in the /skins/ directory.

You get to choose. If you want to swap from the database way to the filesystem way, just clone the skin and all the changes will get moved from the database to the filesystem.

~ @Michael
Really grateful for these types of tips. Thank you!
updated by @holly-dilatush: 09/25/16 06:54:21AM

FOLLOW UP:

Less than three weeks later my site is up and running! I'm sure there will be more tweaking to do along the way but I'm delighted with the initial results. I thought I would post this "Follow Up" for other people wondering about converting form Ning

As it's relevant to some of the decisions I made, I'll mention that I have an IT background but haven't coded in ages. I have limited interest in writing code and NONE in maintaining code for this project.

I decided to go with the Lucid Skin instead of Ningja and I committed to using Site Builder whenever/wherever I could. I had a good idea what I wanted the site to look like (which was quite a bit different from what was offered in Ningla) so I went for a cleaner look to start with.

I did the data import myself as I wanted to understand the process. The tools provided worked really well though I must say that the import service offered is very tempting, especially if you are pressed for time.

I wrote a bit of SQL to transfer a Forum Category over to another Profile and have added a Suggestion for this new function to be added to the JR toolset.
I asked questions when I got stuck and found the JR Team to be extremely helpful with their responses. Their service is first-rate; thanks guys!!

All-in-all a wonderful experience.

Hi Tat
Thanks for the update, and am pleased that the migration went well for you. Your site looks great.
Let us know if we can help any further.
Paul


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Paul Asher - JR Developer and System Import Specialist

Tatiana, if you wanted to give JR a boost and help steer others here, you might consider making a post over on Creators forum concerning your Jamroom migration experience in this thread:
http://creators.ning.com/forum/topics/alternatives-to-ning-social-network
Many of us who migrated to JR from Ning are no longer able to post there (unsurprisingly).


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...just another satisfied Jamroom customer.
Migrated from Ning to Jamroom June 2015

That's an excellent point, Strumelia.

Thanks for the link; I was thinking of digging it up but you definitely saved me some time. I do intend to post there right before I give my notice to shut my old site down.

Did you see that the sale by Cyndx fell through and they're waiting on an announcement of the new new owners? I feel so sorry for people that (for whatever reason) are sticking with Ning. I have a feeling that one day they could wake up and all their data will be gone -- shudders --

It certainly was an incentive for me to move as quickly as I did! Thank goodness that Jamroom made it so easy & painless for me.