The MSJHS.net Team Blog

(TL/DR bolded at the bottom)

I hope finals went well for everybody!

Pages are how MSJHS.net blog integrate with Facebook, so it seems worthwhile to take some time to go over how they work and how they’re different from current clubs’ Facebook Groups.

Groups have been around since the beginning of Facebook when most major clubs got started, while Pages are a relatively new phenomenon. They’re designed for small groups, and have features like officer listings and message-sending capabilities. Pages, on the other hand, are a little harder to operate and quite a bit more complicated, with features that can create graphs of members and integrate Facebook applications. Here’s a link to create a fan page.

To break down the differences:

Content: Pages will import content from outside sources, like your MSJHS.net club site, as Notes. You can also email photos and status updates to a special email address and they’ll appear online automatically for Pages.

News Feed: Most things that happen in Groups or on Pages will appear in members’ news feeds.

Messages: Messages are how many clubs communicate – by sending Facebook messages to members’ inboxes. That’s great if everyone you want to reach is on Facebook. You can’t do send Messages with Fan pages, although you can send Updates (which are just like messages, but they go to a different folder).

Events: Both Groups and Pages can create events. Cool.

Identity: Updates made to a Group will appear in an individual’s name. Updates to a Fan Page will, in most cases, appear in the Page’s name.

So in summary: If you don’t already have a Facebook Group for your club, you should create a Fan Page and link it to your MSJHS.net site. It doesn’t take any time to maintain, and it’s free publicity.

If you have a Group and aren’t using it for messaging, what’s the point of it? Get a Page, and set it up so your news appears on Facebook.

If you have a Group and are using it for messaging, then consider making another Page explicitly for News. It’s a nice way to keep members updated.

If this topic is somehow still interesting, it’s summed up well here.

Over the last couple of months, the team has been hard at work moving our site to a new platform. It’s an idea that we floated at the beginning of the school year when we first launched our site. The things that we’ve learned since then have given us a bit more experience, and shown us that redesigning and relaunching were the best thing we could do.

Apologies to any clubs whose operations were disrupted. We tried to talk to everyone who might be inconvenienced by the change, and we’re happy to be able to say that are plenty of new features that we hope you’ll enjoy. For example:

• Better integration with independent sites (like Weebly, and Tumblr, with email subscriptions)
• Multi-user Wordpress installation (so we can help you troubleshoot, and you can completely customize your own site too)
• Portfolios for both art and writing
• Surveys, school forms, and MSJHS.net Etherpads (coming soon!)

A few of us on the site team are even working on our own web application, and you can expect to hear more about that soon.

Anyway, we’ve been hard at work and will be for quite some time, so stay tuned to further updates on this blog. We’ll be sure to tell you if anything comes up.