It’s my greatest pleasure to introduce another social community of Bangladesh, Prothom Alo Blog, to you all. The site has been made public for a beta period on Friday, 24th October, 2008. And it is expected to be fully released in public on the first week of November.

Me and Hasin has been working on it for a couple month, with occasional help from Anis and Jahed. We’ve tried all our means to make it as user-friendly as possible, without sacrificing functionality and robustness. The blog platform hosts most of the major features of a community blogging platform, along with a few key features which are unavailable in other similar platforms in Bangla.

The site is fully Unicode based, with support for embedded eot font for Internet Explorer. AJAX has been used spontaneously throughout the site to decrease initial load time of primary contents, and slowly fetching secondary contents. All the sidebars of the main pages and admin panels are widget ready and hosts a number of widgets as of now. In future, users will be able to add their widgets as well.

In this platform, we have separated the main site and the administration panel for users. This helps the bloggers as they get a centralized panel where they can mange their posts/comments/links/feeds/moderation/profile etc easily.

Besides the common functionality of community blog, the platform is different in one major context: Moderation. The content from the user’s blogs won’t be moderated. In order to allow this freedom, it’s been decided that no post will appear in front-page of main site categories, until promoted by the moderators. The aim is to provide a place where everybody has freedom of their own blog, but if they want to convey to others, they have to write in a way which actually adds value and abides by the common guideline.

Now that it’s open, we’d like everybody’s comments and suggestions for making it the largest social platform in Bangladesh. Although the registration is closed right now, you can still get into it using an invitation code. The site is OPEN now for public registration, go get one Please send me an email or Contact me using the Contact page if you need an invitation any information/help.

Thanks everybody!