Possible forum enhancements

ice

I've set up this forum pretty quickly on an impulse. I've been interested in learning Toki Pona for a while, and talking about it on Mastodon has convinced me I'm far from alone, so, here we are!

My main idea was to set up an English category and a Toki Pona category, where we would use each language exclusively (or at least try to.) I've also added a few tags, which are available for both categories. I'd like to keep things simple and tidy. I'm not even sure using tags is a good thing, maybe going as minimal as possible would be more fitting. But maybe it can also inspire, give directions, help sorting whatever we post here.

I don't know, and I'm open to any suggestion.

Here's a few more ideas about how this place could be enhanced:

Add other languages besides English (I'm a French native speaker, and I know a few other members of the community also speak French).
Add a blog/journal tag (maybe merge it with "introductions") so people are invited to start a personal thread written in Toki Pona.
Dig into extensions and translations and see if it's possible to translate the whole forum software to Toki Pona for a more immersive environment.
Add Toki Pona glyphs as emojis.

ice

toki!
As you can see above, I’ve used a simple CSS hack to enable the sitelen pona writing system on the forum. I’ve looked into various extensions and other complicated means of doing this, but in the end I’ve simply changed the font for double emphasis formatting.

To sum up, the forum uses Markdown and if you want to write in sitelen pona, you just need to add three * before and after your sentence. It overrides what should appear as bold italic text (I doubt we’ll ever need bold italic text, will we?)

So if you write ***toki pona***, it will be displayed as toki pona. The font we’re using is sitelen pona pona by Jack Humbert. Some glyphs look a bit different because they’re simplified for increasing readability, let me know what you think.

whtrbt

ona li pona mute

jasper

mi wile e sitelen toki-pona a !
Hmm, sitelen toki-pona li ante-lili e ni sitelen toki-pona li ante-lili e ni http://tokipona.net/tp/janpije/hieroglyphs.php
taso li pona sama taso li pona-sama

jasper

Thought that lowercase omega for wile was a bit weird wile is better.

ice

I’m thinking about writing a Flarum extension to handle custom BBCode. It should be quite simple to add several fonts to chose from. I know there’s at least one other font with a closer feel to the original sitelen pona script, and at some point it could also be fun to have an option for sitelen sitelen. Personally I like the current one because I’m biased towards minimalist geometric shapes, but a more hand-drawn style, or even alternate experimental scripts, would also be interesting.

ice

Quick summary of new features:

I’ve replaced the sitelen pona pona font with the more classical linja pona font.
I’ve added an extension to allow image upload.
I’ve created two new tags, “Sitelen Pona” and Sitelen Sitelen", to specify a post’s writing system if you want to.

ice

I know this place is pretty much deserted, but I still use it for my occasional Toki Pona related works, and who knows, maybe other people find it useful too, so I’ve updated the forum to the latest Flarum version. Strangely enough, it went pretty well and nothing has exploded (yet.)