Not happy.
That summarizes my feelings on clubs. I investigated clubs three times in the past and last night I officially converted my group from Group Collaboration over to IP.Clubs, and I'm still deeply unhappy. I feel like I went from driving a top-of-the-line Mercedes to a Kia. The only thing going for the Kia is that it's company-insured to always be supported.
This is an incredibly sensitive topic to me, because the reputation and features of my community are now critiqued by a third-party Club Leader who has entrusted me to move his 12-year group over to my community.
I don't even know where to begin:
No homepage - Your dinky little text box doesn't cut it. My Club Leader understands the concept of a homepage, wants a homepage, and deserves a homepage. A homepage with full ckeditor capabilities with image attachments, bold, colors and all the other wild and outrageous formatting that he wants. He wants it more than an Activity Stream, which we can't customize anyways.
Follow - no club-wide follow. These external members have no bloody clue what your features are, and asking them to follow each node is ridiculous. Getting them through a two-step process to register on my community and then join the club is already a huge ask. But once they join the club, they don't get notified on any of the content even though that's the whole reason why they joined. Once a member joins a club, they should auto-follow the club.
Members
No custom moderator permissions. I have no idea what moderator permissions were just given to the moderator.
No member outreach. How does my club owner actually message or mail his members to market outside of his club?
Nodes - no reordering, which means you're screwed on ordering.
Nodes - no categories within nodes, which is a major pain point for me. I had to convince my Club Leader to reduce 70+ categories into 3. He had detailed categories for each letter of the album A-Z, and now all albums are mixed together in 39 pages of albums. Content is king, and the inability to organize and categorize within nodes is a huge pain point.
Conversion - no conversion of existing nodes. I have no idea how IPS expected me to manually move 49,700 content items into clubs. Content is king, and clubs is not easy to transfer content in / out.
Delete and Move/Delete - In the ACP > Community app nodes, club nodes are not an option when using Delete or Move / Delete.
Node Settings - I, as root admin, don't have full node control over settings or permissions. For example, in galleries I can't enable "only use albums". I have no idea how or where these nodes are inheriting certain settings that are beyond even my control as a root admin, and that's a big problem.
I am asking a Club Leader to trust me to move his content, his members, and his loyalty over to me, yet these are the real challenges that I'm facing: his members aren't notified of new content; his members can't find content in 39 pages of albums; and his moderator and members can do whatever with whatever permissions they want because I can't control user, moderator, or node permissions.
Joel
